Diving into the Twittersphere
All The Cool Kids Are Doing It
You've seen the good (Twitter as a tool for organizing in Iran), the bad (minute by minute updates on the gastronomical and recreational patterns of your friends), and the downright ugly (Ashton Kutcher v. CNN in a race for 1 million followers!). Whether you tweet every day or are still trying to figure out how your organization fits into the social media landscape, there's no question Twitter, and its buddy Facebook, are leading the social networking pack.
Twitter enables users to send and read updates to and from people and organizations they are interested in. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page, and delivered to other users (followers) who have chosen to follow the author and his or her content.
Twitter users can follow anyone or any organization without having to ask permission (unlike Facebook).
Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. The service is free over the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider texting fees.
Audience Considerations
Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others (Pew Internet and American Life Project, Fall 2009).
When you embark on any new online communications plan with your supporters and members, it's necessary to have strategies and editorial guidelines in place. Just as compelling content can win you followers, irrelevant postings and over-tweeting can clutter feeds and lose followers.
Good For
Twitter is a communications platform and as such can be useful in many different ways. Many organizations and businesses maintain a corporate or brand Twitter feed, but the most successful feeds are delivered in ways that keeps the communication personal and informal. In the same way that effective bloggers invest their time not only in writing but in reading and commenting on other blogs, most effective Twitter users spend their time participating with their network, not just talking at it.
Reaching and Attracting
Twitter can support efforts to reach and attract visitors to a campaign or website. If your organization provides content that is of value to your followers, it may get forwarded (RT: or ReTweeted) by your followers to their own Twitter networks. If the quality of the content is good enough, your organization's Twitter feed will begin to attract a readership, both passive and active.
Communicating and Informing
Twitter can provide a platform for an organization to publish or share written content that might be less formal than what they would put into a program or resources section on their website. Twitter is widely used to post links, send out action alerts, or post quick event reminders.
It's useful for getting the word out rapidly, in real time, when appropriate. This can lead to offline action. Check out the first Twestival for charity, where in less than two weeks a group of Twitter users organized a series of meet-ups around the globe in support of a nonprofit working for clean drinking water in developing nations.
Listening and Learning
Twitter can connect a small number of close and highly engaged
members to foster a large network of coalition partners or grassroots
supporters to work together to track activity, share insights, and take
collective action.
Remembering and Growing
Twitter can play an important role in providing meaningful ways for members to participate and be heard by each other and your staff.
Target your tweets. Find public figures, including legislators, CEOs, and community leaders to follow and become followers of your group. You can find usernames on TweetCongress and WeFollow.
What You'll Need to Tweet
- A free Twitter account
- Clear understanding of the metrics you'll use to assess the return on you effort
- Appropriate staff resources and time
- Organizational blogging guidelines
- Appropriate audience
- Able to and willing to let conversation happen
Cost and time considerations
As with any
social media tool, it's wise to remember Twitter is not the strategy;
it helps you implement the strategy. Twitter is not the goal; it helps
you reach the goal. Twitter feeds are only as good as the content
published through them. The quality of your feed is very much a
function of the time and effort an organization puts into it. Five to
10 hours per week minimum is a good place to start.
Connects Easily To
Websites: Twitter feeds can be fed to other websites using RSS. It is also easy to allow readers of your website content to easily share your post with their own Twitter network.
Other social web properties: Information can be easily share to and from most blogs and the most common social web properties including: Facebook, Blogs, Del.icio.us, Myspace, Flickr, and YouTube.
Other people's websites and blogs: Twitter provides RSS feeds which allows the content to be syndicated and shared across the internet.
What Others Are Saying
- "Twitter on the Barricades: Six Lessons Learned," The New York Times
- "On Twitter, Most People Are Sheep: 80 Percent Of Accounts Have Fewer Than 10 Followers," Tech Crunch
- "New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets," Harvard Business
- "Twitteracy (Twitter Literacy)," Beth's Blogs: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media
- "Handful of Twitter Users Do All the Tweeting," Telegraph.co.uk
