Twitter can help you get your voice heard by more people, potential donors, funders, volunteers and service-users. Are you getting the most out of it? Here are a few top tips.
Grow your follower base
Gaining followers is essentially about getting noticed and posting tweets that resonate with and interest people.
Consider these tips for getting followers on Twitter:
- Follow people who follow similar organisations to you, they might also be interested in the content you share.
- Follow people who follow your followers.
- Follow people you are connected with on LinkedIn or other networks.
- Favourite tweets that interest you and relate to your work. This lets people know you have similar interests.
- Include the handles (this is the address of a person or individual on Twitter e.g. @CharityBank) of people you’d like to join your community of followers in your tweets.
- Join Twitter chats to meet new people and organisations that share your interests.
- Make sure you have a steady flow of interesting posts and that you don’t let your account drift into inactivity.
Once you have developed your own strategy for growing your Twitter followers, maintaining their interest in your feed becomes even more important. Follow the tips below for posting tweets that will keep your audience hooked on your feed.
Use a scheduling tool
You can prepare and schedule some of your tweets in advance using a social media scheduling service, for example, TweetDeck, Sprout Social, or Buffer. More sophisticated platforms, which allow multiple users to schedule content like Buffer and Hootsuite give non-profit organisations a 50% discount. Hootsuite also offers a complimentary service to help you improve your social media marketing.
Use images
Research into what makes people engage with content on Twitter shows time and time again that images are everything. Images help to capture the attention of your followers when scrolling through their feed, an engaging image helps to reiterate your message amongst the many other competing tweets.
An article by SocialPilot states that tweets with images achieve 18% more click-throughs, 150% more retweets, and 89% more likes. According to Omnicore, tweets with GIFs get 55% more engagement than those without.
Use videos, quote numbers and hashtags, and utilise emojis
There are a number of additional ways to boost tweets:
- Videos get 10x engagement (Hootsuite)
- Including a number receives a 17% bump in retweets (Richmedia)
- Hashtags (e.g. #Mondaymotivation, #CharityTuesday) can double your engagement when using up to two hashtags in your tweet (SproutSocial)
- 92% of the online population uses emojis daily (AdWeek), whilst 70% of people think that they help to more accurately express their content (Statista)
Latest research from Mention provides an alternative view and suggests that tweets with no hashtags, tagged handles or emojis perform significantly better, which leads us on to…
Test, test, test
To find out what inspires and resonates with your audience you can run a few tests. Create tweets with different themes and tones, and see which ones perform well and which ones don't.
You can measure your results using Twitter Analytics, which is simple to use and captures the impressions and engagements each of your tweets achieve. This Hubspot blog is a good read to get you started.
Testing will give you a better idea of what your audience will respond to and can also inform the content you create on your blog or news feed.
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About Charity Bank
Charity Bank is the loans and savings bank owned by and committed to supporting the social sector. Since 2002, we have used our savers’ money to make more than 1000 loans totalling over £300m to housing, education, social care, community and other social purpose organisations.
Nothing in this article constitutes an invitation to engage in investment activity nor is it advice or a recommendation and professional advice should be taken before any course of action is pursued.