So you’ve got the hang of tweeting and branded your twitter profile, but how do you find more people to follow? This post is the third part in our series of ‘Guides to Twitter’, written by Alisha Ramos. You can follow Alisha on Twitter at @alishalisha and Bright One at @brightonecomms.
 
 
Finding relevant people to follow on Twitter can seem like a daunting process. There are millions of people on Twitter, so how do you find the right ones to follow? Below is a list of useful tools to help you find people to follow.

1. The Twitter Search Engine
The Twitter search engine (search.twitter.com) is a powerful tool. Type in any general search term that is related to your company, nonprofit, or interests, and you can see a live feed of everyone who is tweeting on that topic. It may take some patience to weed through all the spammy, irrelevant mentions of the keyword, but you might be able to find some interesting people through the Twitter Search Engine.

2. Other Twitter Accounts
Looking at who other people are following is also an easy step in following relevant people on Twitter. Many Twitter accounts have “lists” that sort accounts in categories, which can be useful for browsing.

It might be best to start off with an influential person or website in your industry. For example, if I were a nonprofit, I would probably look at a Twitter profile like Idealist (@Idealist) and see who they are following and who they are talking about and do the same with those people and so on.

3. Online Twitter Directories
There are many new websites popping up now that serve as directories for Twitter accounts and groups. Here are some you may find useful:

1. WeFollow – WeFollow is probably the best, and is easy to use. Simply sign in with your Twitter account, add yourself to the directory, and see who else has added themselves in that directory. You can also see who the biggest “influencers” are in that category and who has the most followers
2. Twibes – Similarly, Twibes acts as a directory for Twitter accounts
3. Mr. Tweet – A service that recommends users you should follow
4. Twellow – Another comprehensive directory for Twitter accounts

4. “Find People” Function on Twitter
If you click “Find People” at the top of your Twitter page, you can click on “Browse Interests” and select the relevant category to see accounts that are recommended by Twitter.

Twitter now also has a function on some user profiles which presents recommended accounts to follow on the sidebar.

 
So you’ve got the hang of tweeting and finding other people to follow on Twitter. But how do you ensure your Twitter profile fits with your brand? This post is the second part in our series of ‘Guides to Twitter’, written by Alisha Ramos. You can follow Alisha on Twitter at @alishalisha and Bright One at @brightonecomms.

The background image of your Twitter profile can be a useful tool in building your brand.

Many users add a static background image with a “sidebar” of content that reflects them or their brand. The sidebar is a loophole around the limited amount of information Twitter allows its users to display on their profile page. The sidebar can include anything from a photo of that brand or individual, a brief description of what they do, a list of their websites, and a method of contact.

Below are some examples of Twitter profiles that have been successfully branded by companies or individuals:

Bold Creative’s Twitter account (@boldcreative) displays a simple sidebar image with its logo and important contact information and a URL that directs back to its website. All the information you need to understand what the company is and how you can find out more is there.

Pepsi (@pepsico) advertises a current campaign, the “Dream Machine,” on its sidebar, directing users to the Dream Machine Facebook Page. They also feature members of Pepsi who are tweeting for the company, so that users can know who exactly is behind all those tweets. Many companies opt to do this because it creates a more personal touch to Twitter accounts owned by large, seemingly impersonal companies.

GM (@gmblogs) similarly displays the people who are in charge of their Twitter account, probably for the same reasons as Pepsi. GM also displays their Twitter policy – a disclaimer that states that any 3rd party articles linked to from their account is not their responsibility.

Charity Water (@charitywater) is one of the nonprofits that has done an excellent job with its online presence. Its Twitter is beautifully designed, with a simple background that points users to a specific campaign.

Travel Channel’s Twitter (@travelchannel) has a nicely designed background that is branded well. It points users not to its website but to its other Twitter accounts for its various shows. If you go to these other Twitter accounts, you will see that each of them are also consistently branded with the Travel Channel, sometimes even using similar sidebar graphics – which is brilliant. Even in its variety of shows, the Travel Channel manages to maintain a consistent image.

As you can see, these companies have successfully used the user’s screen to provide relevant information and links — all simply in their background image.

5 Steps to Make A Background Image With Sidebar on Twitter

It’s simple to create a background image that has a sidebar on twitter. Here is the simplest method:

1. Take a screen grab of your Twitter account (with the window maximized.)
2. Paste the screen grab into a photo editing program of your choice (like Photoshop).
3. Create a sidebar graphic in the empty space you see to the left of your Twitter feed, making sure that it is not too wide or too close to the top or left side of the canvas.
4. Select the rest of the image that is not the sidebar and delete it.
5. Save your background image, upload to Twitter, and you’re done!

If you are well versed in graphic design, you can get fancy with this method – for example, you could a background color, add a gradient as the background color (as Pepsi has done), and so on.

If you are searching for a generic background, or one with a ready made template, websites like Twitrounds or Twitrbackgrounds work well.

 
So you’ve heard all about Twitter and decided to sign up. But now that you’re in, how do you grow your Twitter followers? This post is the first part in our series of ‘Guides to Twitter’, written by Alisha Ramos. You can follow Alisha on Twitter at @alishalisha and Bright One at @brightonecomms.
 
 
1. Follow relevant Twitter accounts.
What does “relevant” mean, you ask? Once you define the niche for your brand (for example, “nonprofit”), a simple search on Twitter with the relevant keywords will bring up several recent tweets that mention that keyword. You can sift through these accounts and see which accounts could be relevant to your brand.

Once you find a few key Twitter accounts to follow, the rest of the process is quite organic. You can look through the followers of these accounts and see which ones are relevant to you, or even search through their lists if they have got any set up and do the same.

Following relevant accounts usually prompts people to follow you back. This is not to say however, that you should follow every Twitter account imaginable. Notice the phrase “relevant accounts” — why would someone follow you back if they are not interested in what you have to say? Make sure you keep everything, from your tweets to your tweeps, relevant, and the rest will follow.

2. Use hashtags.
People search for hashtags on Twitter all the time. By adding hashtags to the end of your tweets, you can bet that someone will stumble upon it and decide to follow you. One simple hashtag might be #nonprofit.

3. Engage in conversations.
One thing your Twitter should not do is to simply promote yourself. Nobody wants to follow a Twitter account that is simply an RSS feed of their blog posts or news.

To capture the attention of others, and to remain personable and personal, it’s important to engage in real conversations with others. The simplest way to do this is to @ reply – either answering questions that have been posed, asking a question, commenting on something they have posted, and so on. But as always, don’t simply do these actions to do them – be sincere in your every interaction and you will see better results.

Retweeting is another way to engage and to distribute ideas or links that you believe are valuable to your audience. For more info on retweeting, take a look at Twitter’s own guide.

4. Add value.
Simply tweeting about your day is not going to be particularly interesting to your audience, so you should keep in mind this golden rule: add value.

Whether it’s releasing a nugget of information from your organisation, or tweeting about something you just read on the internet (with a link, of course) – whatever you post should be relevant and valuable to your reader. “Content is king” not only for blogs but for Twitter accounts as well.

5. Stay relevant.
If you are running a Twitter account for a nonprofit organisation, keep it relevant to nonprofits or what your organisation is doing. Unfortunately, no one really wants to read about what you had for lunch!

We’ve had a great reaction since Bright One and CharityComms launched the CharityComms 2020 initiative a few weeks ago.

The presentation has had over 1600 views on Slideshare (not quite at 2020 views just yet!) and created plenty of buzz on Twitter with the hash tag #cc2020. It’s also been great to see people writing about CharityComms 2020. You can read reaction from PR Week, Brand Republic, Just Giving, School for Social Entrepreneurs, and the blogs of Steve Bridger, Darragh Doyle and Amy Sample Ward.

We’ve even received additional entries, bumping up the number of contributors in the presentation to 21. Thanks to Stuart Witts of Marie Curie Cancer Care, Rob Dyson of Whizz Kidz and Susan Farrington of the MS Society for their five predictions.

The updated presentation is embedded below:

Rob Dyson even recorded his five points in an Audioboo, which you can listen to here:

Thanks also go to the original contributors: Jonathan Waddingham from Just Giving; Steve Bridger; Vicki Browning, Director of CharityComms; John Carnell, Founder and CEO of Bullying UK;  Gail Scott-Spicer from The Scout Association;  Sue Fidler from Charity Email;  Gideon Burrows, Editor of ngo media; Adeela Warley, Head of Communications of Friends of the Earth; Lynda Thomas, Director of Externall Affairs for Macmillan Cancer Support;  Zoe Amar from Lasa; Julia Cream, Head of Communications for Timebank;
Jaz Cummins, Web and New Media Manager for Amnesty International UK, Amy Sample Ward;
Rachel Beer, Founding Partner of Beautiful World;  Victoria Rae, Head of Communications of UNICEF;
Jude Habib from Sound Delivery,  and Joe Saxton from nfpSynergy.

And a special thanks to Vicky Browning at CharityComms for agreeing to work with Bright One on the project in the first place!

This is a post about Bright One’s series of training sessions held exclusively for Bright One volunteers and clients. Please get in touch if you are interested in running a training session for Bright One. We’d love to hear from you!

Following last month’s inaugral Bright One training session on ‘Talkability’, a group of Bright One volunteers and clients were given an exclusive training session by Melanie Seasons, Social Media Strategist at Onlinefire, all about ‘Social Media and Online PR’.

During the session, Melanie described why Audience Mapping is important (Understanding who your target audiences are and what they ‘do’ online, as you need to know what platforms are best to engage on and if you already have advocates) and some of the tools you can use to find them. These tools included paid-for services such as Radian6, right down to free tools such as Google Blog Search, Addict-o-matic, IceRocket, and BlogPulse.

She also took the attendees through the basics of Social Media Relations, where organisation engagee with their audiences through Social Networking (Twitter, Facebook), Pro-active outreach (e-mail, newsletter, events) or Online press offices (blogging, video).

The attendees were also left with a few final thoughts to take away with them:

• Starting from scratch can be tough – establishing a social media profile does not happen overnight
• Expect growing pains – you’ll figure out as you monitor where your audiences are online
• Sign up to it all, but don’t expect to be able to do everything – concentrate on what works for you, and build a strategy from there

All in all, it was a fantastic session, so many thanks to Melanie for giving us a superb insight into Social Media!

It’s fair to say that here at Bright One we’re fans of social media. It’s potential to aid third sector organisations to reach and communicate with the individuals who support them, as well as reach new people is vast. We use it a lot when it comes to working with our clients, but it is also a vital tool in our internal and external communications. We see it as a great way to bring together a team of volunteers working remotely, helping them to connect in much more dynamic ways which suit their lifestyles.

We thought that it’d be good to let you all know how we here at Bright One use the internet to reach out to people, so we’ve made the below Bright One Online guide(using the excellent online tool Prezi). It shows you where you can find and connect with all of Bright One on the internet, and keep up-to-date with what we are up to. To watch the guide you can either navigate through it manually (by clicking on the arrow which takes you through each point) or hover over it until you see “autoplay” and it will take you through it..

You can find the links to all our online presence below…don’t be shy, come and find us!

]]> http://brightone.org.uk/bright-one-online/feed/ 1 http://brightone.org.uk/welcome-to-bright-ones-twitterverse/ http://brightone.org.uk/welcome-to-bright-ones-twitterverse/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:16:33 +0000 nicolajones http://brightone.org.uk/?p=1515

We were playing around last week with a really cool tool which we thought we’d share with you: MentionMap.

MentionMap helps you to “Quickly find relevant people to follow.” You can use MentionMap to see Twitter conversations as a network and click any user to explore more about them, which means it’s a really neat way to visualise who you talk to most on Twitter.

It shows you your main connections and then who they are connected to in the thinking that you might also be interested in talking to them – almost like it’s suggesting new Twitter connections in a really nice visual way. Of all the tools available for checking out your impact on Twitter, this has to be one of the most visually friendly and easy to take future actions from.

We liked it so much, we thought we’d try it out for Bright One:

Bright One’s MentionMap shows we are heavily involved in conversations around some of our clients, in particular the PixelProject, Childsi and Junction 49.  Interestingly enough we’re also strongly connected to organisations we’re friends with – Media Trust and UnLtdWorld.  These connections are important to us, as it’s good for us to be involved in conversations around charity and social enterprise PR and communications, not just promoting our work and the work of our clients, but actively learning what is happening around the sector. That experience and learning will make us a more rounded team. It also highlights we might want to connect more with some of our other clients, and our volunteers individually, helping us to see where we need to focus our efforts on.

Pretty neat right? So why not check out MentionMap – either for fun, or to see how distracted you’re actually getting on Twitter!

This is a guest post by Ken Punter, Digital Media and Publications Manager, World Vision UK. To participate in World Vision’s Week for Children and become one of the 5,000 Britons to sponsor a child please visit www.worldvision.org.uk or call 0800 501010.

World Vision launched its first national Week for Children on 8th June with an urgent appeal for 5,000 new child sponsors. Five is very much the theme of our campaign, with over 5,000 children in need of sponsorship in five sub-Sahara African countries that have amongst the highest child mortality rates in the world. This is largely due to the five main killers of under-fives: malaria, HIV and AIDS, pneumonia, measles and diarrhoea.

We are aiming to raise awareness of the nine million children who will die from preventable illnesses this year. 99% of these avoidable deaths will occur in the developing world, so we are urging members of the public to give just a little to make a huge difference to the lives of children and their communities.

A large part of the initiative was to increase awareness of the campaign. In additional to our outreach to national and regional print and broadcast media, we used a number of digital channels to communicate our message.

People would be communicating to their friends and peers as potential sponsors, whether through word of mouth, blogs or Facebook, who may then pass on the information to other potential sponsors. In addition to the Facebook fan page that has videos and images, we also created a YouTube and Flickr channel to increase visibility on arguably two of the most popular sites in the world. These sites also make it easier for readers to share the information and provide an interface many are perhaps more familiar with.

Twitter and Facebook allowed us to increase our interaction with supporters. Most importantly, it allowed our messages to be spread more effectively. Through these channels, we are also able to acknowledge and thank those who helped spread the message.

Blogger outreach is seen by many to be a fundamental tactic when creating any digital campaign and we took a relatively conservative approach even though we felt that our information could be relevant to many blogs. Initially we identified several blogs who we felt were a good balance between influence and relevance to our campaign.

Throughout we asked the questions: have they written about World Vision in the past? How likely were they to write about this campaign? This allowed us to concentrate and build relationships with a small number of bloggers. We continued with this organic approach to blog relations through the Week for Children, only approaching those bloggers who reached out to us via Twitter or Facebook.

When looking at any type of communications campaign, we always look at how digital tactics fit in with offline tactics and “real world” activities – we believe that they should always work together and not in silo. To this end, every piece of content created is related or repurposed for use online, via the offline media or in the “real world” with each tactic driving traffic or interest to the other.

For instance, we partnered with Channel 5 for a series of reports on the five killers of children under five in Zambia and Mozambique, to be broadcast during the 5 o’clock news slot throughout the Week for Children. Channel 5’s news correspondent, Jonathan Samuels, met with mothers who have lost children and looked at how simple interventions are saving lives and transforming communities. This was communicated to both our Facebook Fans and Twitter followers, who then spread the message to their friends.

Social media tactics can go some way to helping improve the reach of a campaign. Facebook Fan Pages, blogger relations and Twitter can help you build a relationship directly with supporters and key opinion leaders. However, only by combining the digital tactics with traditional communications tactics could we optimise our campaign.

To participate in World Vision’s Week for Children and become one of the 5,000 Britons to sponsor a child please visit www.worldvision.org.uk or call 0800 501010.