Eight Top Tips for Organizations New to Twitter: Part II – The Two “Rs” of Twitter
November 6th, 2010 | Published in Strategy | 1 Comments
This is the second of three posts in a series targeted at organizations that are new to Twitter and hope to quickly make it a part of their suite of fundraising tools.
This post’s tips focus on the Two “Rs” of Twitter: Retweeting and Responding
4. Make it easy for others to retweet you.
Ask for retweets to convey urgency or an especially important message. Reaching out to your followers to help you spread your message empowers them to involve their own network in the cause. It also conveys the message that you’re eager to expand your reach.
How to: To be direct, append a tweet with «Please RT!,» «RT Plz,» or a similar call to action. Saying “please” has a big payoff.
Craft tweets that are ripe for retweeting even without making a direct appeal to your followers.
How to: Keep your tweets short so others can easily add «RT @yourorgname» and stay under 140 characters, in case they prefer not to use Twitter’s automatic retweet function. Keeping your tweets short also allows your followers to tweet your message and add their own thoughts, all in one tweet.
How to: Pepper your tweets with some of some of the “most-retweeted” words to make it more likely that your tweets will spread quickly across your network. “You” and “Help” indicate that you want to engage in a personal conversation with your followers, and “New Blog Post” suggests that you want to share meaningful content.
5. Acknowledge engagement with personal responses. Don’t let the conversation die once someone has contacted you; thank them for their participation.
How to:
Send a direct message (DM) to new followers to thank them for joining your network. Use their name. Include a link to your webpage or blog. For example:
«Thanks for the follow, NancyLou! Looking forward to saving sea turtles together. www.saveturtles.org»
Direct messages are also a great way to thank people for retweeting your messages:
«Thanks for the RT! It sure is a frightening statistic!»
If you query your followers and get responses, thank them for their input:
«What a great idea, Pam – thanks for the link!»
Immediacy is important: say «thanks» quickly to stay relevant.
Stay tuned for the third and final post in this series! [You can find the first post here.]
November 6th, 2010 at 8:22 pm (#)
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