After two illustrious years, I am leaving my current job as Press, PR & Social Media Officer for World Cancer Research Fund and moving to pastures new. As part of my handover, I have been asked to write a 'social media for dummies' document for the newbie who takes over the @WCRF_UK twitter feed.
This feed is very much my baby. I pushed to set it up and have single-handedly managed it ever since. Now considering I did have all my other PR bits and bobs to do as well, I think the fact that we are at nearly 800 followers is quite the feat. So here below are the 10 most important things I learnt setting up the feed.
1) Be friendly, informal and interact, interact, interact. Don’t just promote your blog or services, talk to people. Respond when they talk to you. It’s a great way to talk to other charities and supporters. I even managed to sign people up for WCRF's Beat the Banana run via twitter.
2) Use hashtags! My personal favourites are #kickcancer (this is a great campaign created by a girl who actually had cancer.) #health #recipe and #badjoke that I used at least once a week for WCRF's badjoke of the week and healthy recipe of the week. These are quite popular with WCRF's followers and it’s good to create little regular ‘features’ to make the feed enjoyable for followers. For example:
Oh and our GGC #badjoke of the week: What kind of room can't you walk into? A mushroom! http://ow.ly/2bdT9
Our #health #recipe of the week is this yummy Mediterranean chickpea salad http://ow.ly/2bdRl
While we are on hashtags, never forget a #charitytuesday or #followfriday. For example, tweet this on a Tuesday:
Happy #charitytuesday! @DiabetesUK, @DiabetesUKCymru, @CRUKWalton, @royalmarsden, @BCCare and @CR_UK #kickcancer
It’s a great way to spread the love and often people will do a #charitytuesday or #followfriday in return (you can also do #ff for Follow Friday if you don’t have space.) Another one people do is #fundraisingthursday but that isn’t as common. Always thank people or return the compliment if they do this for you. It’s just nice and to ignore it can come across as rude. Also, RT other people! I RT @NHSChoices, @BCCare, @DiabetesUK, @thebhf and @CR_UK a lot because their messages were often similar to WCRF's and it’s a way of showing support.
3) Use applications, set up tweetdeck. This application is invaluable to me. You can also get it on your phone so you can tweet on the move! (I never did this, preferring to, er, have a life.)
Hootsuite is also great, it's free and easy to set up. You can follow multiple twitter accounts, and schedule automated tweets for the weekend or just later in the day when you might be busy. This is not regarded as good social media practice however, so don’t do it too much, however, it’s a good tool if you are busy/would like your own weekend. If anyone retweets or speaks to you over the weekend, do respond first thing Monday morning. Again, it’s not the best social media practice but I think many people understand when you are a small organisation and responding or thanking them for the RT on Monday is better than nothing.
Socialoomph is another free and user friendly tool. You can create automated DM messages to new followers, among other things.
5) Twitpics! People love a good picture, so do add pictures to your account from the twitpic website as much as you can.
6)If you have a lot of pictures all at once, just put them on facebook. You can set it up so they will then automatically load onto your twitter feed as soon as you put them on facebook.
In fact, you can set it up so everything you put on facebook will then automatically load to twitter. I still like to then put another separate tweet about the same thing onto twitter though. Just because it’s then a direct link to whatever I’m promoting. It doesn’t matter that it’s a duplicate. Other twitter feeds duplicate all the time. Don’t do this too much though.
7)In terms of timings, I’ve been told that good times to tweet are first thing in the morning, lunchtime, and between 5-6pm in the evening. This is when people are most likely to finish/take a break from work and may check their accounts. 11am and 3pm are also good times. All of Friday afternoon is an especially good time! I often tweeted a silly game from WCRF's Great Grub Club children's website as a ‘relieve your Friday fatigue’ type thing. At the weekend or on bank holidays it’s best to tweet between 11am and 2pm as this is when most people are online.
8)Time management! I tended to spend an hour in the mornings on twitter and then just responded to things as and when/scheduled tweets throughout the rest of the day. Otherwise you really could be on there all day and never get any work done. It’s good to keep a half an eye on it though.
9)Be a person from an organisation, not a monolithic organisation voice. So, tell people who you are and tweeting the occasional ‘I did a 10k today, my legs are sore’ will make the feed a lot more accessible to followers. Although, of course, keep it on message. And make sure this is the case with any personal feed you may have. As far as my personal followers know, I am an extremely active health geek (which is mostly true) and this is in line with the WCRF's messages. If you are not comfortable with this, up your privacy settings. This goes for facebook too.
10)It’s ok to use exclamation marks! When I used to be a journalist I was told it's frowned upon to use too many 'dogs dicks' and in the most part I agree. But you don’t have many characters here, so it’s ok to use extreme punctuation to make your point quickly. It’s also ok to use shortcuts, such as 2 for two, to, too. There is a function in tweetdeck that can do this for you. (It can also change the language!) Although normal grammar applies of course. Not that other tweeters always follow that, but let’s rise above.
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