There’s no way around it. It’s time for a rant.
I follow hundreds of nonprofit organizations on Twitter, and a precious few have a clue about what they’re doing. There’s no apparent strategy, squandering a ton of staff time (and donor dollars) on a potentially invaluable information sharing tool.
So please, please get some professional training. For starters, here’s a heads up to orgs using Twitter practices that make me want to pull my hair out:
1. Stop begging. We know you need volunteers. And money. And tickets sold for your event. But, sending out a litany of tweets begging for these things, day after day, tweet and after tweet, is turning more people off to your organization than you could ever imagine.
2. End the “tweet dump” Yes, a best practice is to tweet 5-6 times per day, but not all within a 20-minute span. Space out those tweets, at least hourly.
3. Say thank-you (but not publicly, after every single re-tweet). Twitter has a wonderful culture of collegiality: If someone retweets a piece of your news to their legion of Twitter follows, you are gaining valuable exposure to a new group of potential supporters, donors, businesses, etc. So, for Pete’s sake, acknowledge that gift by thanking the retweeter! But consider a group thanks on #ThankfulThursday or a direct message, and stop the endless public thank-you tweets.
4. Tweet strategically, feeding in to the goals outlined in your overall communications plan. Don’t have a communications plan? You need one before you start tweeting.
5. If your tweets are set up to drive traffic to your website, then UPDATE your site BEFORE you tweet. Don’t drive traffic to a website with outdated content. Or one with hard-to-read text. Or one with lots of broken links. Or one with your key content buried somewhere on your site. Fix all that first.
6. It’s not all about you. Retweet others. Frequently. It may seem counterintuitive, but the more expansive and helpful you are, while sharing with and promoting others on Twitter (and other social networking channels, for that matter), the more likely they are to reciprocate and promote (and share with) you.
7. Give credit. If you find a terrific article on Twitter, by all means share it with your followers. But, share the source of the original tweet.
8. Stop automating Foursquare with Twitter. I don’t care if you are at your dry cleaners. Ever.
9. Make your tweet “re-tweetable”–not silly, spammy, or irrelevent. A key strategic goal of Twitter is to extend your reach to other networks; hence, it’s a great thing for others to re-tweet you. Part of the art of Twitter, then, is to construct cogent tweets that inform and spark interest, in less than 140 characters. (Importantly, for someone to easily retweet you, you’ll need to make your original tweet 140 characters minus the number of characters in your Twitter handle, less 4 extra characters for “RT,” a space, and the @symbol.)
10. Stop ordering me around. A tweet that says “Watch our video” and includes a link has automation written all over it (and says nothing inviting about the content). Write something interesting about the video or photo, and then invite me to take a peek. Treat your followers like real people, not robots.
Ahhh. I feel better now.
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Photo by zen_orchid, “My Rants,” Oct 1, 2011, Flikr Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 Generic License
