10 Twitter Best Practices for Nonprofits

From Nonprofit Tech for Good

It’s impossible to apply Twitter best practices across all segments of the nonprofit sector because of the wide variety of causes and follower counts, butscientific analysis of Twitter clearly indicate that there is right way and a wrong way to use Twitter. The challenge is for nonprofits to learn from and apply the scientific data to their Twitter strategy. If you study Twitter and grow to enjoy using it, then your time invested will eventually pay off through increased brand recognition, referral traffic, new donors, volunteers, and event attendees.

1. Give your followers useful, interesting, retweetable content.
A highly retweeted tweet posted by @Oxfam, this tweet taps into the power of statistics, the popular issue of income inequality, and includes a unique visual that helps the tweet stand out from the clutter. By prioritizing content related to their cause, @Oxfam is consistently retweeted, thus promoted by their followers. A nonprofit that prioritizes getting retweeted by sharing unique, interesting content is much more successful on Twitter than those overloading their account with fundraising asks and self-promotional tweets.

 2. Write tweets in clear, concise language – no abbreviations and always use proper punctuation.
Over the last 6 years, @NonprofitOrgs has tweeted more than 12,000 tweets and over that time two best practices have revealed themselves and consistently proven themselves to be true. First, tweets that are written in complete sentences without abbreviations and therefore easy to read are retweeted much more often. Second, tweets that end in either a period or a colon before the link are also retweeted more often and thus tend to have higher click-through rates. A messy, overloaded tweet just isn’t worth tweeting. Take the time to format tweets properly.

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