Tweet it. Before 2006, this would have been a nonsensical phrase, inciting nothing but the whistling interpretation of a bird call. But now this common, every-day phrase conjures the image of the small blue bird, the icon for Twitter. Twitter has rapidly become one of the most widely used social media forums in the world and gains new users every day. While it began primarily as a method for keeping up with the daily activities of celebrities and friends, many organizations quickly realized the potential audience for marketing and developed methods for using Twitter as a successful recruitment and customer service tool.
Unlike the relic of marketing past—the print ad—Twitter is not a one-way conversation, and therein lies its brilliance and benefit. Particularly, when it comes to a non-consumer oriented organization, i.e., non-profits, associations, community organizations; Twitter offers a unique opportunity to create loyalty, promote events and services, and to listen not only to what people think about the organization specifically in a direct conversation, but also what people think about in general through monitoring and listening to what is being said. Campaigns must be run carefully, however, to minimize the potential to develop a bad social reputation. Below are four tips to help run a successful Twitter campaign.
Tip 1: Be human
Twitter should never be approached as standard advertising. No post should appear to “push” anything. Instead, it is important to approach posts with as much humanity and personality as possible. Rather than using a purely business tone, posts should be written in a casual, friendly voice that draws people in and makes them feel like they know and are able to connect with the author. When followers feel they can trust the author, they can also trust the services or products that stand behind the brand.
One of the best ways to gain followers’ trust is to intermittently sprinkle personal comments between business tweets. Allow your followers to know who you are. Who are the people at your organization? Why should they care what you say on Twitter? Ask employees to participate in your organization’s Twitter campaign, and give them the opportunity to create a unique voice. Encourage your employees to use real photos of themselves and to have their real names in their bio. To manage your association’s risk, you might ask your employees to put this short phrase in their Twitter bio: “Opinions expressed by me do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.”
Individuals involved in membership, fundraising, event planning, etc., have varying perspectives of your organization’s needs and goals. Allow that to drive a real conversation, but set best practices to keep the messaging concise and consistent. A simple solution to the task of constantly monitoring your organization’s outgoing Twitter messaging is to select a social media management tool to organize your authors, and schedule post content. With a social media management system, employees can be granted the ability to draft tweets for your organization’s Twitter account, but an administrator is able to approve or edit all the tweets before they go live. By allowing other members of the organization to participate in Twitter marketing, you can create a sincere and likable persona and reputation for your organization.
Tip 2: Monitor your account
No good will is served by setting up a Twitter account, posting a few times, and then never bothering to check back. Twitter has to be nurtured; you need to follow the right Twitter users, find your own followers, study what topics are trending, and then tweet continually. Interacting with followers is the key to a successful campaign. By responding to tweets and messaging new followers, you show an active interest and once again “humanize” the organization. An easy oversight is neglecting to thank followers for following your organization. Without an employee monitoring the account 24/7, this is a difficult task to achieve. Instead, set up an automatic direct message through a social media management system that simply says, “Thanks for following!” when a Twitter user follows your organization.
This is more than simple politeness; it is an essential business necessity, which is particularly important when a follower posts a tweet referring to your organization. Always re-tweet or reply in a reasonable time (say, within 2 hours if during daytime hours and within 8 hours if overnight); conversations in 140 characters or less move very fast. The urgency of Twitter is at a pace far faster than most media. Once again, there is no reason to have a Twitter account just to forget about it or check sporadically. Responding to followers, re-tweeting posts and replying to posts directed at your organization builds a genuine relationship and should be taken seriously and nurtured like any relationship.
Tip 3: Get attention
Because there is a 140-character max on Twitter posts, lengthy commentary is not possible. To the best of your ability, make those 140 characters as witty, thought provoking and attention grabbing as humanly possible. Once you have built a following, tweeted regularly and nurtured the relationship with your Twitter followers, focus on GETTING THEIR ATTENTION. Your followers will not hesitate to click on links you tweet when they know and trust you, and when your tweet stands out on a scrolling list of tweets that updates by the second. It’s daunting to attempt thought-leadership in bursts of grammatically-incorrect, text-speak sentences with funny looking short URLS while competing with millions of other Twitter users for the attention of people that really matter to you: your members and potential members. But that is the task at hand. This is our new reality. How do you offer the best, most up-to-date and relative content? Somehow, you need to notice, catch and catalog the tweets that garner the most feedback. You have to analyze where you’re making an impression, and identify a pattern of success that can be recreated. This is another benefit of using a social media management system – you can view reports on which links are getting the most clicks, giving you insight into the types of tweets that are most attention-grabbing.
Tip 4: Listen
When social media came onto the scene, it forever changed marketing and consumer opinion-gathering. Everything on the web is immediate, and Twitter is no exception; in fact, it could quite possibly be the best example. But regardless of the pace, keeping up is still a necessity of modern business practices. And because it is so important to know how you’re perceived by your members, the two most important habits to form are tracking replies and re-tweets and creating unique hashtags to identify topics. To determine what type of reaction your tweets get, you’ll need to monitor which tweets at what time of the day garner the most participation to build your marketing techniques around the trends that you identify. A hashtag is simply a keyword that helps users to group tweets, making them more search friendly. For example, placing #Avectra in a tweet will group the tweet among others with the same topic. For each campaign you run, create a unique hashtag to identify the campaign the tweet belongs to. This way, when members and potential members want to comment on a topic, they too can utilize that same hashtag to identify the topic of their tweet and follow the conversation. This is a great best practice for associations to use for conferences and events (#AUDC12), discussions (#assnchat) and more.
There is much debate within the industry of how to best measure the success and ROI of technologies such as Twitter. In the end, each organization needs to judge if Twitter is an appropriate part of their respective organization’s “social” strategy. But, by having a social media management system, your organization gains the ability to listen and participate in the discussions members are having with other members about the important issues facing your membership and your industry. This will allow your association to make smarter business decisions regarding the products and services you offer.
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