How to Effectively Promote Your Non-Profit on Twitter
If you are in charge of a nonprofit organization, you will likely need to schedule certain events in order for your organization to achieve its mission statement. But even once you have a specific date in mind, you will still need to promote your event effectively in order to ensure it is a success.
One of the best ways to promote your event is through the use of social media. Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram are currently the most popular social media platforms in the United States. Each of these platforms—whose use should not be considered mutually exclusive—gives your organization a unique opportunity to reach a broader audience.
We take a look at some of the ways you can use Twitter most effective when trying to promote an event.
Create a hashtag that is specific to your event
What makes Twitter unique from some other social media platforms is the frequent use of “hashtags” that can be found in almost every successful Twitter post. A good hashtag can help link your post to other related conversations and is very useful for creating connections.
What are you hoping to achieve on #socialmedia? How do you plan to #connect with your audience?
Ideally, you will want to use a hashtag that is specific to your event. For example, if you are trying to organize a food drive in the city of Chicago, you will want to end every tweet with a hashtag such as #ChicagoEats, #ChicagoFoodDrive, #FeedChicago, or something similar. This will also help make your event seem important and be more widely recognized.
Frequently post content that people will want to share
One of the best things about social media is that, when used effectively, you can get other people to do the work involved in promoting your event for free. By creating content that is sharable, interesting, and appealing to a wide variety of people, your tweets will inevitably be extended to a much wider audience than you would otherwise have access to.
Before you post anything on Twitter, ask yourself, is something that people are actually going to want to share?
The value of any social media post is its shareability. In order to make your posts more sharable, you might want to consider incorporating pictures, graphics, jokes, pop culture references (though you should avoid politics), and other things that most people generally find to be interesting. Taking the time to work on a high-quality tweet related to your audience will undeniably be worth it if you can get other people to retweet your content.
Make it clear that the content is related to your event
If you are using Twitter for the purpose of promoting a specific event, it is not enough to merely be active—your content will also need to be clearly related to the event you are trying to promote. With every tweet you compose, you should assume that this is the first time people are hearing about the event you have in mind. This means you will want to mention the specific time, date, location, and type of event you are talking about. Otherwise, even if people are interested, they will not necessarily be able to act on their interest.
Post your content onto multiple social media platforms
Though Twitter is certainly a useful platform for promoting a specific event, using Twitter is by no means mutually exclusive. In fact, most social media specialists will tell you that in order to establish an effective presence online, you will want to establish yourself on multiple different platforms.
The more social media platforms you use, the more likely it becomes that a given individual might hear about your event.
Many people have multiple social media accounts, but dedicate the overwhelming majority of their time to a single platform. Because you don’t know what a specific person’s platform of choice might be, it is a good idea to make sure you get all of your bases covered. Cross-posting on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and elsewhere is relatively easy and can widen your reach.
Keeping these simple pieces of advice in mind, your non-profit organization can begin to effectively communicate via Twitter and, inevitably, be ready to put on a successful event.