Our Twitter Strategy

When developing our Twitter communications strategy, we were faced with one reoccurring issue:

As a non-profit looking to promote high quality engagement, our goal is to influence and reach out to a range of stakeholders. Our audience base includes active volunteers, potential volunteers, partner agencies, funders, artists, media, and the broader public looking for more information on who we are.

So, if we write posts that only focus on one group, does that mean the others will tune us out (or worse, unfollow?)

We needed a way to organize our outgoing Twitter messages (since Tweetdeck only allows you to sort groups for consuming tweets). We are open and excited to adapt our strategy as we learn more and things change.  For now, to tackle the “what to post when” issue, we’ve developed a daily posting schedule that targets a particular interest group each day.  This is not an exclusive list; some days we might wreck the plan and retweet a United Way post on a Thursday (because great content is great content).  Here’s a snapshot of the schedule:

• Monday: Tweets of interest to United Way, retweet United Way posts, find interesting articles of interest to this group.

• Tuesday: Tweets of interest to non-profit agencies in general, relationship management and community building in the non-profit space. Note: Tuesday is “Charity Tuesday” on Twitter.

• Wednesday: Tweets that appeal to the broader public: feature blog posts from local artists, comments on relevant news stories, and promotion of Timeraiser or Civic Footprint.

• Thursday: Tweets of interest to Volunteer Centers:  Promotion of Civic Footprint, a reminder to log your volunteer hours, or tweets that focus on Volunteer Centers in specific cities.

• Friday: Re-tweet our Top 10 favourite tweets of the week (ours and others) and Follow-Friday mentions.  We’ll maybe throw in some fun posts, since it’s the start to the weekend and all.

It is our hope that as we gain dedicated followers who engage with our communications, a publishing pattern will begin to emerge.

What do you think about a daily content-schedule for Twitter?  For Twitter users, how are you managing multiple audiences? We look forward to your feedback.