Twitter For Nonprofits: Establish & Grow Your Presence

Twitter is a powerful network that gives everyone a voice online. If your considering using Twitter to promote your Campaigns, find Donors, find partners, tTwitter is one of the best platforms to consider, Twitter isn’t just a great way to share relevant, time-sensitive, and important news with your followers. It’s also a direct line of communication with people who are invested in the cause you serve – whether they’re already committed donors or just finding you for the first time. If you are serious about establishing your voice and gaining new supporters, we think Twitter for nonprofits is a great way to gain traction.

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How do you use Twitter

Home page

Like any social network, Twitter has a predefined template that can be customized in some aspects.
First you need to choose the name – short and effective – accompanied with a short description that explains to users who we are and what we do. Better if the description is unconventional, to arouse curiosity: many people will judge you based on these words. A tip is to include keywords with hashtags in the description (“Bio”) , being careful not to make it seem advertising but rather descriptive of the activity. In this way we immediately indicate to users which hashtagswe use to disseminate company updates, and they will know how to track them in the flow of information.
From an aesthetic point of view, we know that images always have a great impact on users. It is advisable to insert the company logo as a profile photo and carefully choose the cover image, possibly recalling the company colors and symbols, and respecting the dimensions recommended by Twitter:  for the header 1500x500px, for the profile 400x400px, for the images of the posts 588x293px.
It is also important to enter the address of your website, customizing the url so that the name of the brand appears (for example: www.twitter.com/linkomm). In this way the Twitter home page becomes a real Call to Action .

Create contact with users

Once the home page has been created , we can dedicate ourselves to creating contact with users . Twitter provides 140-character space for each post, so first you need to be short and get straight to the point. By its nature, Twitter is a friendly and unconventional medium, so too formal and detached tones should be avoided. The message must be addressed to the public, to stimulate responses and interactions. Users go to Twitter to search for information and find solutions to problems. In order to attract their attention, we will therefore have to propose interesting information and solutions, without too much disclosure of our commercial purposes.

What to publish?

The flow of information flows very quickly on Twitter, each user has an average of 500 followers and does not read all the posts on the home page . To ensure that our contents reach many people, we can propose them several times in the course of a day, at different times, but with the precaution of changing the text of the post from time to time . Be careful not to overdo it with republishing so as not to fall into spam.
For a company that wants to promote itself through Twitter, it is important to share only quality content , which encourages users to click on links and retweet them . To have a good visibility it is necessary to publish frequently, and therefore have material to share. In this sense it is also useful to share the posts written by others , if these are interesting: they will add value to your account and generate more shares.
Since the message space is limited to 140 characters, it is useful to shorten the links placed in it. You can use portals like Google Url and Bitly to get links of less than 20 characters. Furthermore, it is a good idea not to exceed 100-120 characters , to leave space for those who want to share the post, so that they can quote your name (” mention “, including the @ symbol) or add a comment (MT – ” modified retweet “).

Why do companies use Twitter?

The purpose of opening a company account on Twitter is generally to promote and direct users to the website. In fact, it gives the opportunity to communicate your company to improve its image. It follows that the larger the audience ( followers ), and the more the target is targeted, the greater the impact on the audience.

But Twitter is not only useful when it comes to advertising: it also offers the possibility to hear what people say about us. It is likely that someone already talks about our company, and looking for the conversations in which it is mentioned is useful to understand what are the perceptions that users have.

In addition to being a simple communication channel that provides information and generates traffic, Twitter is also – and above all – a tool for dialogue with individual users. Many companies use it as a Customer Service : users can ask questions and receive immediate assistance for products. There must be a real listening and assistance system behind it, otherwise it becomes counterproductive for the company.

The use of Twitter is now consolidated even during conferences and events , during which users can ask questions that will then be taken up in the discussion from the stage. In this way you get a greater involvement of the public, who will share the event and talk about it with their followers ; in addition, all participants will also be reachable at a later time and in a confidential manner through their own account.
Twitter is particularly useful when it comes to promoting an event : a hashtag used in the right way allows you to get great visibility and spread the initiative. For example, let’s look at how GAM Torino uses the hashtag to advertise the exhibition ” The merchant of clouds “.

Furthermore, with Twitter it is possible to integrate one’s business offer , offering users a higher level of service and at the same time encouraging dialogue with them.

A great merit that must be recognized to Twitter is that of encouraging socialization to produce value . It is a question of supporting social interaction and exploiting it in such a way that it itself produces value. News spreads very quickly on Twitter, and the first one who gets it shares it with others right away. You can answer a question from a user and simultaneously provide information to all others who have the same problem, using hashtags .

Two very useful tools to circulate information on Twitter are:
– The Twitter Button : the official button to share content available on the web on Twitter
– Shareaholic: an extension available for the main browsers, which allows you to share news and links on over 100 websites between social networks and information portals. It makes sharing very fast and allows you to automatically shorten the link url.

Promote the company with Twitter

1. Plan actions

The first thing to do is plan the actions on the social network . A strategy for the Tweet Plan is summarized by Social Media Examiner :

• Choose the audience : think about what kind of people we want to tweet.
• Deciding how many tweets to send daily , based on two parameters: how much we want to be active on a daily basis, and what our audience likes. Let’s remember not to limit ourselves exclusively to publishing scheduled tweets, but also to add tweets in real time to involve the public more.
• Decide how long to schedule tweets (weekly or monthly), considering how fast we process user feedback.
• Reflect on which keywords to use : choose those that use followers, possibly short or acronyms (considering the limit of 140 characters).
• Plan different types of tweets trying to intercept the needs of users, to add variety.
• Choose the time of publication , so as not to release the tweets all together and to intercept users at different times of the day.
• Schedule tweets using a content management platform (e.g. Hootsuite , Buffer ).

2. Write viral tweets

To write tweets that go viral we need to rely on copywriting and content marketing techniques .
The first thing to do is insert a Call To Action : if we want our followers to share a tweet many times, just ask them, giving a reason. The tweets that are shared the most are usually written by highly influential people on Twitter, so consider asking an influential user to retweet you sometime, at least for the most relevant posts. Calculate the best time of day to post tweets, that is when your audience is most active (usually between 11 and 15). Tweets must be high quality content, containing relevant information and links, and if they include heavily retweeted words they will be found and shared more.

3. Increase followers

Increasing the number of followers is important because by reaching a large number of users, the chances of increasing business and profit grow.

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There are several ways to increase our followers:

• Buying followers online : there are many companies that sell packs of followers, making the page grow; the problem is that these followers will be very numerous but inactive, they will never interact with tweets . The secret of having many followers lies in the interaction with the social network , so if you want to build a real and interested audience, it is better to spend more energy to engage users.
• Searching for users with similar interests to ours and tweeting with them: it’s the slowest and most labor-intensive method, but the most profitable in the long run. It takes time and patience, but the followers you get this way will be people who are really interested in our business, who will reply and share our posts.
• Using tools: tools like SocialBro  allow you to define an acquisition target and direct you to Twitter users who show passion for the topic we deal with. The users acquired in this way are real and interested in what we do, so the result can only be positive

4. Measure the results

After spending time and energy setting up a strategy on Twitter, it’s important to track the results it produces. There are so many solutions to measure Twitter statistics ; reliable platforms are Twitonomy  and Twittercounter  (free), and Twitalyzer (paid).

In conclusion, we can say that Twitter is a tool that offers companies real possibilities to broaden their audience and reach interested users. It is an effective means of communication, if managed with a reasoned content planning strategy, and with copywriting and content marketing skills . Twitter is a platform for interactions and discussions, so it is important that communication is not unique and purely advertising, but knows how to involve the public by encouraging dialogue and participation. We must always keep in mind who we write for, who we address: only in this way would we have an audience that follows us with interest and interacts with our posts.