Suitable for:
All types of organisations.
What is it?
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service. It allows users to send “updates” (or ’tweets’: text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website via short message service (e.g. on a mobile phone), instant messaging, from their computer at home or work, or through a third-party application.
Benefits:
Second only to Facebook, Twitter is one of the most popular social networking services.
It’s a good tool to keep your “followers” updated with the most important news of your campaign.
Benefits
- Second only to Facebook, Twitter is one of the most popular social networking services.
- It’s a good tool to keep your “followers” updated with the most important news of your campaign.
Limitations
- In contrast to Facebook, Twitter doesn’t have that many options for posting materials. The main tool you have is a short “tweet”.
Creating a profile
- When you create a name for your profile you can use the name of your company or blog - it then becomes known as your @companyname.
- Upload your logo in the place of a photo - it's best not to use the Twitter default avatar because people like to see who you are.
- Include a URL to link to your organisation/campaign.
Communicating via Twitter
- Follow people – other organisations, anyone of some personal interest to you and as you start to use Twitter you'll find more people you want to follow.
- Be concise: the only way of communicating here is a short “tweet”.
- It’s more informal tool so it involves informal language.
- Remember to update it regularly.
- You may use it during your events: a person can post tweets in a real time during a press conference for example.
- Put links to your webpage in your tweets (e.g. a link to the newest press release). Use the bit.ly page to shorten them.
Don’t forget to add “hash tags” (“#”) to your posts. You have to add them to the keywords, e.g. #OSH. This enables other users to search and filter based on those key terms, collaborate and share relevant information.
