Restarting your Twitter account
Restarting your Twitter account shouldn’t be such a big hurdle, but you do need to prepare. Just as we discussed in the Facebook blog entry in February, you need to think not just about today's tweets but build a set of tweets for the next several weeks and "discover " content to retweet. Having a set of tweets ready to go really takes the pressure off.
It is important to remember that on average a tweet is only good for about 36 hours. What that means is that if your followers don't see your post in that period, they probably won’t see it. Though it wouldn't seem like it, this short viewing time is good news. It means you can recycle tweets without too many people seeing it twice or thrice.
So where to start, let’s assume you have an active Facebook Page. You can start by scaling down versions of those post to 140 characters or less and post them on Twitter. In fact, I would bet that you can get two or three tweets out of a single Facebook post. If that is the case, then you can schedule those over the course of a couple of days.
At a large organization, you can highlight a different program each week. I recommend working with program staff to create a series of tweets. You can write these a week or two ahead of time. Then schedule them to go out during the week. If something special comes up, simply do a one-off tweet. I will sometimes ask staff to email me photos during the week. I can add those to my prepared tweets or create new tweets. Remember those tweets are only active for a few hours. So reuse them.
I recommend that prewritten Tweets should redirect to pages on your organization's website. As we have discussed in a previous post, tweets ideally, should highlight information you are already promoting via your website. In this way, you get the best value out of each post or tweet. By driving traffic to your website, you are giving readers the opportunity to discover more about your organization or cause. It also puts them closer to your DONATE button. It also forces you to keep your website up to date - never a bad thing.
Another good tactic when restarting your Twitter activities is to retweet "discovered" content. Retweeting is an ideal way to increase your tweets and to share great content you didn't have to create. I try to have at least on retweet a day. I don't always make it, but I try. One way to find content to retweet is to get help from a social media aggregator like Hootsuite. I find Hootsuite to be a great way manage my social media presence and to find content. And it is very simple to use.
The most important thing is to get started- write a bunch of tweets, get your program people involved, use an aggregator, Retweet others content. Hey, it is only 140 characters or less!
