The range of Twitter continues to grow, and the microblogging service is apparently now important enough to itself be a subject of research. A recent Rutgers University study looked at the different ways that people use Twitter. For the full story, see “80% of Twitter Users Are All About Me” (Mashable.com), but I’ll summarize. Basically, the researchers classified tweets into eight types. I think a brief discussion of these types might be useful for nonprofits thinking about either starting a Twitter account or trying to make theirs more effective.
The types were: Information Sharing, Self Promotion, Opinions/Complaints, Statements and Random Thoughts, Me Now (personal status updates), Question to Followers, Presence Maintenance, and Anecdotes. Actually, technically there were nine types, but two were different kinds of anecdotes, and that just seemed unnecessary.
The main result of the study (and the source of Mashable’s headline) was that 80% of their quite small sample of 350 users were using Twitter mostly as a “Me Now” service, posting personal updates and not much else. I have to assume that this leaves out spammers … but anyway, the question it brings to mind is this: How much of each of these types should a nonprofit Twitter account be posting?
Check Yourself
For those organizations that have a Twitter account already, there’s an obvious place to start, and that is a breakdown of your own feed’s recent tweets. Since we’re relatively new to Twitter (at least on the @charitygeek account), I can pretty easily break down all of our posts to this point. Our first 25 tweets have been made up, as it turns out, of 16 Information Spreading posts, 8 Promotional posts, and 1 Presence tweet (our first, basically saying “hello, we’re here”). That’s 72% Information and 32% Promotion. I would argue that promoting our own posts about our subject are also somewhat informative, but we’ll stick to the categories in the study.
Stay Close to Message
This blog’s whole reason for being is to spread information, to inform, and so I’m pretty happy with 72% of our tweets being informational. The 32% that are promotional are all links to our own posts, which is, at the end of the day, a main reason for having the Twitter feed at all. I would say ours is an example of being on message, perhaps to a fault. If there’s one thing that I’ll take from this study, it is to be a little more flexible with the account. There is definitely a place for the “Questions to Followers” and “Opinion” posts. Take a look at your percentage, and make an effort to stay close to your message, if not consistently on it. Don’t be afraid to veer slightly off if the topic is something that your followers will find interesting, or that will start or maintain a discussion.
Make the Distinction from a Personal Account
Many high-profile nonprofits have an account for both the organization as a whole and the president/chairman personally, and I think this is the way to go. A personal account lets you be more flexible, and use your personality as the tool for your cause that it really should be. That also allows your organization account to be a little stricter. Discussion is a vitally important part of the Twitter experience, and I would never counsel any group to use it purely as a promotional tool, because that is not an effective use of the service. But keep in mind what your followers want to see, and by all means, ask them what they want to see. They are interested, and your Twitter account can be a vital tool in keeping them so.