Despite various controversies in recent years around politics and privacy, Twitter still offers great opportunities to digital marketers. In this article we’re going to look at how your charity can immediately take advantage of this platform.
You may already have a full Twitter marketing strategy for your charity, or might just be taking your first look at the platform. In either case these tips can help improve the way you utilise Twitter to get the message out for your charity and increase awareness, donations and build relationships with supporters.
1. Schedule content for when your audience is on Twitter
Twitter is very much a “real time” platform which means you need to dedicate a reasonable amount of time just “being” on the network, every day, engaging with other users and building a presence for your charity.
But it’s not all about engaging. There is still room for broadcasting on social media, and this is where scheduling tools become vital. You need to make your content available around the clock, and you can’t be sitting at your computer or on your phone all the time. Tools such as Tweetdeck are free and let you schedule tweets to be automatically posted whenever you choose. One of the hashtags we participate in at Charity Box is #charitytuesday, and each week we schedule a number of tweets to be posted throughout the course of the day.
There is still room for broadcasting on social media, and this is where scheduling tools become vital.
By implementing some subtle automation into your charity’s marketing strategy, you can slowly grow your Twitter followers in your downtime.
2. Build links with other organisations
Unless your charity is very niche in its cause, it’s highly likely you’ll find other organisations doing very similar things to you. Use this as an opportunity to learn from them.
Spend some time searching for similar charities and follow them. Share their content and talk to them on Twitter. This is a great way to build up relationships with others who will in turn be happy to support you. But don’t stop there – look for individuals who work at the charity and follow them also. This is a great way to get on their radar, and if you tweet interesting content, they’re bound to follow you and share your message.
This may feel like the long game, but it’s what Twitter is all about!
3. Don’t be afraid to ask for donations
Twitter is awash with people asking for help, opinions and guidance. Look out for these questions by using the search feature. For example, the search “which charity to donate to” produces dozens of results of people asking for advice on which charity they should donate to.
This is a relatively untapped resource because many smaller charities don’t know it exists or don’t feel that they should approach people directly. But by searching Twitter every week for tweets like this, you can find lots of opportunities to engage potential new supporters in a very cost-effective way.
4. Recycle your older blog content
If your charity’s website is built on the popular open source platform WordPress, there are a number of free tools that enable you to automatically post your content to your social media channels. If you have dozens (or ideally hundreds) of blog posts, this can be a fantastic way to reuse older content in your charity’s social media strategy. The great thing is you don’t really have to do anything; content is posted automatically and will drive traffic through to your website in a consistent and sustainable way.
Take a look at the Revive Old Post plugin for WordPress. We include this in our charity web design service, making online marketing for your charity that little bit easier. If you’d like to have a no-pressure chat with us about how we can help your charity, get in touch with us now.