Non-Profits
If you are involved in a non-profit, tweeting about their events and upcoming activities is a great boost to their exposure. Everyone’s community has worthwhile organizations that do not get the funding they need or the level of interest they could use.
By being a visible advocate, you provide a voice that reaches influential readers who can retweet your message. This is a great tool to utilize when the organization has a fundraiser.
As we saw with the devastating Haiti earthquake in January, 2010, the ability to instantly respond with charitable contributions made an incredible difference in the ability of aid organizations to react quickly as donations made via cell phone exceeded $6 million in 72 hours.
This is a great example of technology continues to put more power into the hands of individuals to directly influence the outcome of events.
Email Signature
A simple way to spread your Twitter presence is to modify your email signature.
Below your standard signature, whether it’s your name or sign-off, add your Twitter handle.
In my case, below a dotted line I use:
“Follow me: @geofftucker”
If you are not using an email signature currently, learn how to create one on the Beginner’s Social Media Tips & Techniques tab [link].
Rankings and More
After you have tweeted for a while, you may want to see how well you’re doing relative to others.
Don’t worry – there’s a site for that, too.
Twitter Rankings
Twitterank.com uses the number of incoming replies to score each Twitterer that is supposed to represent their popularity.
Enter your own name to see your rank, and enter the names of other users to see their scores.
While the numbers should not distract the value of your tweets, it is a way to measure to your influence and activity level across your social network – or “social graph” in the parlance of social media people.
If you have a score that you do not like, do not get discouraged from tweeting. As long as you have providing useful information, this matters more than what any rankings site says.
Twitter Etiquette
Every medium develops a preferred style of communication that works with its unique features.
Text messaging via cell phone replaces whole words with numbers (“4” is “for”) to accelerate typing speed and maximize the limited message length.
Twitter is a little more forgiving so use complete words as much as possible.
There are clever ways to enhance your tweets by weaving in @, = and # tags.
For example:
@sandyjk Thanks for attending #BobThompson2010 w/ @davidkelly tonight
This tells your follower Sandy that you are thanking her for attending the Bob Thompson political rally with her friend David Kelly. Your followers can see that you thanked her, too. Each Twitterer mentioned can be found by your other followers.
Why is this good?
It invites others who attended or who support Bob Thompson to find like-minded people they can connect with. That is why hashtags matter. These conversations are what build community. By tweeting about it, you provide connections among people who might otherwise not know each other. And the same value proposition holds for you.