7 Steps to Promoting Your Organization in Twitter
By Lisa Gualtieri, Editor-in-Chief, eLearn Magazine
[excerpt]
http://www.elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=91-1
1. Try Twitter to learn about it. Follow Mark's lead at NIOSH and try
Twitter for yourself. Forrester Research CEO George Colony agrees: "You
can't understand Twitter, Facebook, or blogging by reading an article in a
magazine [even here]… you won't be able to truly understand how they could
change your business unless you actually use them."
2. Become a bit of a rogue. Forget policies and guidelines and instead
bring to your own Twitter use the initiative and conscientiousness that
Mark brings to his.
3. Commit the time required to tweet regularly. David Armano blogged for
Harvard Business Review that the "economics of using social media in
business requires the participation of people to fuel it. It is not simply
enabled by technology that maintains itself." Mark's production and
sustained use is undoubtedly greater if his Twitter time is considered
part of his job.
4. Tweet about information that is relevant and timely to attract and
retain followers. Good tweets come from multiple sources and it takes
diligence to locate them. Setting Google Alerts can help. Have a topic mix
that appeals to your current and desired constituency; topical articles
are much more likely to be retweeted than what you ate for lunch!
5. Pace your tweets. Tweet too often, and you'll lose followers. Tweet too
infrequently and risk being overlooked. Mark's experience is that multiple
times each day works. Also be sensitive to when your potential and
existing followers are online.
6. Use other channels to get more followers. Promote your Twitter
participation widely.
7. Consider how Twitter fits into your overall social media strategy.
Exploit Twitter's unique capabilities; Mark could follow the lesson of
many businesses that monitor customer reactions on Twitter to identify
safety topics that NIOSH doesn't currently address. Finally, Twitter, like
other social media, is constantly evolving, so adapt with it.
