Twitter is perhaps one of the fastest-moving social platforms. With hundreds of thousands of tweets being shared every day, maintaining visibility and driving engagement become key challenges for most Twitter marketers. Here are a few tips for your non-profit to make sure that its tweets don’t go unnoticed.
1. Share fresh, trending content consistently
The quality of content you share and the frequency of your posting activities are two important factors that determine the amount of engagement you’re able to drive on Twitter, or any other social channel for that matter. Take a look at UNICEF’s Twitter page and you’ll see that they’re rather disciplined with their posting – they share one tweet almost every two hours.
However, maintaining consistency and quality can be quite challenging, especially if you’re curating your posts and sharing them manually. Using content curation and scheduling tools like DrumUp and Feedly is a smart solution to this problem. These tools simplify the process of content discovery and save you significant time and effort in the process.
2. Use custom hashtags for dedicated campaigns
Custom hashtags are a great way to make your content more discoverable, while also creating a strong call to action around a campaign. When you use custom hastags, it also becomes easier to track conversations around them. As a result, you’ll be able to better monitor your campaigns and identify followers who are engaging actively with you. This also gives you an opportunity to interact directly with such followers by thanking them for their support or encouraging them to spread the word further.
3. Get your team involved in your Twitter campaigns
Additionally, custom hashtags also serve the purpose of SEO. Since search engines now index hashtags, using a custom hashtag consistently across multiple social accounts will help enhance organic search results. Tools like Keyhole and Hashtagify are extremely useful in tracking and monitoring hashtags.
Pushing content through employees’ or volunteers’ personal accounts can help you pull some weight on Twitter, particularly if you’re just starting off, or don’t yet enjoy a massive following. However, this can be a tricky terrain since not all of them may be willing to pitch in. You have to be careful not to coerce your team into retweeting or sharing your posts. Instead, just make sure that they’re genuinely interested in your campaign, and everything else will follow.
But it’s not always easy leveraging a large group of employees, volunteers and campaign partners to talk about your cause or campaign on social media. You need to make sure that there’s a unified message coming out of all these conversations. One way to do it is to issue broad guidelines that all your employees or volunteers should keep in mind when sharing any branded content. Design an employee/volunteer engagement program that focuses on how social sharing will benefit them. Keeping them in the spotlight will also help you retain their interest in the long run.
4. Post strong visual content for improved engagement
Given the rate of activity and the short time windows of exposure you get, making an impact on Twitter is no mean task. Strong visual content helps grab the attention of your followers amidst a stream of other tweets. You could use visuals in a number of formats such as images, charts, infographics, memes and videos, to name a few.
Tools like Canva and Easel.ly make it extremely simple to create visual content. While creating visual content for regular social updates shouldn’t take too long with the use of these tools, you might have to invest some time in planning and strategy if you’re going to be executing a more large-scale initiative. The Kony 2012 campaign by Invisible Children might be a good case study to learn from – the campaign included a 30-minute video that was produced to make people aware of the criminal acts of Joseph Kony. Although it was surrounded by controversy, it made a huge impact on Twitter, Youtube and other social media platforms, becoming one of the most viral campaigns at the time.
5. Share results of your campaigns to earn trust
As a non-profit it’s critical that you establish trust and maintain good relationships with your donors. Social media platforms like Twitter are a quick and effective in communicating with all your donors at scale. Sharing the results of your campaigns or projects makes you a transparent organization, and in effect a trust-worthy one.
Over the years Twitter has grown to be one of the most effective platforms for Non-profits, particularly after initiatives like the dedicated ‘Donate Now’ button and virtual events like ‘Twestivals’, which allow Twitter users to organize live fund-raising events. Hashtags like #GivingTuesday have become annual events (in 2014, fundraising efforts through the hashtag grew by 63% over the previous year). So, there’s no doubting the power of Twitter!
Now, here’s a bonus tip for making it all the way to the end of this blog – you can also use Twitter to promote your other social channels. When developing a social strategy for multiple platforms maintain some exclusivity on each in terms of the content you share – this will act as an incentive for people to follow you on multiple channels.
————
Vasudha is blogger at Godot Media, a leading copywriting services firm. She writes extensively about social media and content marketing. Her other areas of interests include business and travel.
