13 Jun 2012 8 Comments

Back to Basics: Twitter for your nonprofit

If you’re thinking about getting serious with Twitter but don’t know where to start, fear not, here’s a quick and easy introduction to Twitter.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online social networking and micro blogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets.” Twitter is used by individuals, professionals, brands, governments, nonprofits, and everything in between. The good news? Creating a Twitter account takes all of 5 minutes and is completely free.

The Twitter language

Here’s a quick list of the Twitter lingo you many encounter:

Followers - After you create your nonprofit Twitter account, you’ll see that you have a “follower” and “following” count. When you are “following” someone their tweets appear in your Twitter “feed”. A “follower” is someone that follows what you tweet.

Keep in mind, just because you follow someone doesn’t mean they automatically follow you back. You must entice them with you tweets to have them reciprocate.

A Twitter Handle – Is your Twitter username. It’s the name you have chosen to represent yourself on this social media network. For example, our’s is @FirstGiving. Adding your Twitter handle within your emails and on your marketing materials is a great way to make those that are already involved with aware you’re on Twitter.

The @ Symbol – Said best by Deanna Zandt, “Put this before any other Twitterer’s username to refer to them. Why? It creates a link to their profile automatically, which is handy for your followers to track conversations or look at people you’re referring to.” Think of it as simply tagging another in one of your tweets.

Retweets – Think of this as Twitter’s equivalent to an email’s “forward” option. When you agree with a tweet so much that you’d like to share it verbatim, you can choose to “retweet” it from either the actual tweet itself or manually. If you choose to do it manually, simply include “RT” and the user’s Twitter handle before the tweet to indicate where you have taken the characters.

The #hashtag – A hashtag, represented by the pound symbol (#), is a tool used to aggregate a conversation surrounding an event or theme. As an example, we use #FGwebinar to help aggregate the conversation on Twitter surrounding our webinars. These are public that anyone can search.

Trending Topics – If a particular #hashtag becomes popular it becomes a trending topic. Trending topics can be filtered by major cities and countries. (i.e. you can filter trending topics for Boston, Tokyo, or Australia.)

Direct Messages – Most action on Twitter happens in the public however you can use direct messages as a form of private messaging. Just remember that these are limited to the 140 character constraint as well.

Using Twitter to your nonprofit’s advantage

Many nonprofits use Twitter to raise awareness about their work by posting news and updates. Others use Twitter to highlight what is happening within their community of supporters, such as stories of people raising money on FirstGiving. What can your nonprofit organization add to the conversation?