Hello!
Ok, so you’ve heard about Twitter, individuals and businesses rave on about how useful it is to engage with your audience, get content out there and how it increases business.
But time is precious and often we can’t find enough time and resources to look into Twitter and create content for it. Most of our aim isn’t to increase business as such but to increase awareness of a cause and organisation, which will be done differently to if you wanted to, say, increase sales. Many don’t even know where to start.
Here are just a few tips, to help you get started and make the process less painful! 
1) Follow other people and organisations- I know this sounds obvious but, you would be surprised at how many people create accounts and just sit there waiting for people to come to them. Go, and actively search for other accounts that interest you and your organisation, follow and engage with them, even if you just tweet them a Hello and this is what we do.
2) Write interesting and engaging tweets- people don’t want and will be put off by marketing tweets and posts that just keep asking for donations. Posts exclusive content, may be some behind the scene stuff like what goes on in the office, what work have you been up to, what’s coming up and what should people look out for, engage with other organisations by replying, retweeting and liking posts, this shows you are interested in what they do and engaging with: remember it’s not all about you- show that you are listening
3) Get involved with current and relevant conversations/trends- by doing this and using the relevant hashtag , you are exposing yourself to a bigger audience
4) Create visual content- people are more likely to read images than plain text (plus an image takes up more room on their timeline so they are more likely to see it ) and it doesn’t take up any of the 140 character limit, which means you can add even more detail into your tweet!
5) Share you’re success stories- this will not only make extremely good content, but will increase brand reputation, showing off the difference your organisation makes will make others, engage with your content and get them interested in your work.
It’s all great knowing all these tips and tricks, but you will probably be thinking, but I don’t have the time to sit down and do all this. This is where I advise the following.
• To make the first bit easier for you, why don’t you take offer an internship opportunity or recruit a volunteer, this will not only help you get yourself off the ground, and it will give somebody a great experience and an opportunity to shine. While they are here taking the first few steps for you, you can learn from them and they may also bring new ideas which you may have never thought of before
• If you are looking at more of a long term solution, why not recruit a communications/marketing/social media worker who’s job it is to-do all your marketing and social media work
• Alternatively, why not take on an apprentice, this is not only good for you as an organisation but also give opportunities to young people to improve their skills and gain experience
I know all this is very brief, if you would like to know more and gain more practical advice on Twitter please visit our training page of our website, where you can look out for our next social media training course and Social Media Surgery. https://www.manchestercommunitycentral.org/support-groups/training
See you next time!
Aneeqa :)