Non-profits: The seriously simple Twitter strategy (Part 2)

We covered the core principles in Part 1 of how to have a rock-solid, easy to manage, and Seriously Simple Twitter strategy. It’s all about identifying the right users to engage with and being as lightning fast as your feed. Building on the principles we covered already, here is the play-by-play of how to do it and to easily plan your days, weeks, and months to keep your Twitter time allocation to a manageable amount.

Each Day

• Step 1: Check your Direct Message’s (DM’s) and @Mentions, respond to those you can and delegate the rest.
• Step 2: Copy/Paste all your correspondence in your Twitter Reference Doc (TRD).
• Step 3: Copy/Paste your Retweets in your TRD and consider a “thank you” @Mention to your supporters.
• Step 4: Select 1-2 of your pre-written unique tweets for the day from your TRD.
• Step 5: Select 2-3 tweets of interesting and relevant content from those you follow to Retweet.
• Step 6: Select 1-2 industry news or common interest portals of your niche as links to share in a unique tweet.
• Step 7: Load and schedule your tweets to go throughout the day at relevant times.

It’s best to do these duties first thing in the morning to achieve maximum exposure, however international groups should always be conscious of variant time-zone audience.

Whatever time of day you perform your Daily Steps at, be sure to come back at least once to check your Direct Messages (DM’s) and your @Mentions. This way you can manage your correspondence and stay informed on conversations involving your organisation.

Once a week
Create 10 unique tweets for the week, think of informative topics like organisational platforms, information relating to your cause, landmark statistics or historical days, etc. By creating your tweets in advance you can knock the creative process out in one day rather than having to think “What do I say today?” and risk being repetitive, irrelevant, or uninteresting. This is also a great way to let others assist without having too many people directly managing the account. Add these to your Twitter Reference Document (TRD).

Tweet something fun, entertaining, and slightly off-topic, this not only adds the human element brands and organizations too often forget about but also broadens your pool of possible engagers, you never know what potential supporter you might strike up conversation with about a Dalai Lama quotes.

Follow an additional 10 percent of your current follower base. For example, if you have 100 followers, follow 10 more people; if you have 500 followers, follow 50. This will address your need to grow your follower base without doing ‘mass followings’ which often result in pointless audiences and spam to your own feed. It’s easy to hit the “recommended follow” section in your profile as well to find new people to follow, but a good place to start is to find organisations similar to yours and follow the people they are following. Not only do they already have an interest in your field but they also may contribute to your knowledge base which is a Twitter Win-Win.

Create lists of people that you follow in the lists function, it will help you stay organized for users as well as information categories. Set a goal to create 1 list a week or to put 10 users into a list each week. It may seem like a ‘do-later’ task but after you are following 1000 people it will seem cumbersome to even tackle at all. Stay ahead of the curve and create basic lists from the get-go.

Once a month

Analyse your Twitter Reference Document (TRD) and start recording the emerging patterns, strengths, and weaknesses that you see so that you can adjust your Twitter Strategy. Play to your strengths and if you find a topic that people find highly interesting from your feed, then give the people what they want! If you keep feeling the impulse to tweet about a topic that seems to fall flat then either change your presentation tactic or drop the topical attempt all together.

You should also see similarities in questions/comments from your followers, this means you should add this to your ‘prescribed responses’ list. This list should be a section in your reference materials that comprise of responses to FAQ’s, points of information, and possibly negative feedback.

Clean up your feed by eliminating the twitter dead weight in those you follow. If a person isn’t adding value or at least following you back then ditch them because it will only add noise to your feed without any social capital gain or marketing benefit.

After a while you’ll become so comfortable with Twitter you’ll be able to manage it so well that this strategy will seem automatic and you’ll tailor something that best suits your organisation and even load tweets for weeks and months in advance. If you manage your time on Twitter well you’ll see the cost-benefit of it emerge quickly and your group’s efforts will be amplified with a far reach of an audience as well as potential.