In the for-profit world,
twitter can most time-efficient way to keep up to date on potential clients, clients, competitors and trends. Unfortunately, without seeing a significant and immediate ROI, not enough non-profits take the time to use it right. But you should, if only for these 5 reasons.
Connecting with other non profits
Not enough collaboration happens in the NPO world. There are many organizations working on the same cause and with Twitter’s powerful advanced search feature, you can find them fairly easily. There is a gold mine of good connections out there, you just need to find the nuggets.
You can also check out other NPOs to find out about their twitter strategy to learn and make yours better and even glean leads from their follower list.
Community building
This one should be fairly obvious, since with well over
200 million monthly active users, there are certainly quite a few that will want to hear about your cause.
Social proof
It’s easy to get excited about non-profit reading through their website. You then proceed to their twitter account. Population 160 followers. Last tweet 6 months ago. It’s a bit of a let-down. Sure, you would like to assume they are too focused on their mission to let social media slow them down. But still. If you have someone doing serious research about you (grant-makers, potential volunteers/donors, other non-profits, etc.), they will see likely check your social media presence. You want to make a good impression.
Getting your message out there
Content is king in online marketing and twitter is a time-efficient way to create and curate it for both external and internal purposes.
It is fairly easy
140 characters every day or two is not going to kill you. Even if you do not have your own non profit blog post/event/original thought to promote, you can post quality articles, inspirational quotes or even just re-tweet others. It makes an easy assignment for a volunteer, intern or virtual assistant. And there are countless tools to help you.
