Monday, June 15, 2009

Tweeting For Your Nonprofit (Part II)

Below are additional tips and suggestions for improving your nonprofit’s exposure by using Twitter. These follow a post generated on Sunday, June 7.

4. Follow Your Impact on Twitter By Monitoring Retweets

How are your followers responding to your tweets? Are they retweeting your messages to disseminate them to an even wider audience? Occasionally, click your profile name on the menu that appears on the right side of the screen to find out how many tweets sent by other tweeple reference your profile name. Many could include retweets of former postings you generated. Continue building this loyalty among followers so they become great mouthpieces for your organization and its cause.

5. Drive Followers to Your Web Site (and Measure the Impact)

Thanks to http://www.tinyurl.com/, Twitter users can convert long URL addresses into short pithy links to web sites, which can be embedded in tweets. Indeed, an excellent way to ensure a loyal audience of Twitter followers is to serve as a reliable information resource. Sending Tiny URL links to other web pages and documents is a good way to do that. If you monitor the traffic your web site receives (and if you don't, you should), you can measure the impact of tweets on your followers by tweeting links to your web site (perhaps to new videos, pages or project success stories recently posted) and then determining whether your web traffic has increased. It's not an exact science, but if you notice a significant uptick in your web site visitors shortly after you've posted a tweet with a web site link, you'll have a good guess why people came by).

6. Tweet Often

As Woody Allen said, fifty percent of success is just showing up. Or was it sixty, or seventy or eighty percent? I forget, but the point remains. Tweeting often convinces your followers and the Twitterverse that you're in it for the long haul, that you didn't just set up an account to see what it is like. One tweet I received the other day linked to an article claiming that more than 80 percent of Twitter profiles have fewer than 10 followers. Individuals just passing through don't interest other tweeple and so, to ensure you are not one of those, tweet loud and tweet often. You'll generate respect and engagement (though it may take time) and, in the end, you'll have discovered a great tool that is already having a huge impact in online communications and allows you to spread the word about your great cause and mission!

1 comment:

Peter C Vetro said...

Hey there Joe. Interesting & very informative. Still not sure about tweeting. Seems like a little too much dumbing down to me & very limited.

Too much inane chatter.
But, more power to you & everyone into it!