Yesterday I was looking at the Twitter feed of a Toronto non-profit organization, and it sucked. It sucked so bad that I wanted to shake their social media person, or give them a hug. I won't publicly shame them here. The worst part is that they have the potential to be awesome at Twitter, and all it would take is a few simple changes. Such as:1. Don't send your Facebook updates to Twitter.
I'm guessing there is some app that allows you to update your Twitter from Facebook. I've never used such an app, because the idea makes no sense.
Tweets must be 140 characters or under, whereas Facebook updates can be more characters than that. Unless you're making sure your Facebook updates are under 140 characters, your tweets are going to be a bunch of cut-off sentences. No one wants to read that, dude.
2. Get a real live human being to tweet for you.
Here's where it gets terrible. All of this organization's tweets are sent from Facebook. Every single one. It makes it feel like their Twitter is run by a robot. They need a dedicated human tweeter, one who posts real-time updates, asks questions and engages with their followers.
3. Have conversations with your followers.
This is another big one. Scrolling through this organization's feed, I noticed that they never RT anyone who mentions them, they never ask questions to drive back-and-forth dialogue, they never reply to people. Are we really to believe that no one ever tweets them a question or comment?
If someone @ mentions you on Twitter, the least you could do is acknowledge them with a response or RT. It takes fives seconds. (Or you could favourite their tweet, which takes less than one second.)
4. Follow back.
Unless a follower is a pornbot, you should always follow back. It's not like you're going to be reading every single one of your followers' tweets. Like the conversation thing, it's just a small gesture to show you appreciate their support.
Fun fact: This organization is currently following 0 people. Not cool.
5. Fill in your bio.
The "bio" field of your Twitter profile is an opportunity to share some basic info about your organization, like what it is you actually do, where your office is located, your hours, whatever. This org's bio is blank.
6. Tweet several times a day.
And they just keep comin', folks. This org tweets an average of 1-3 times a day. I'm sure there's differing opinions about how many tweets a day is "enough," but one a day is for sure not enough. With a bit of creativity, they could think of enough stuff to say. Which brings me to my next point...
7. It's okay to tweet about stuff besides what your org does.
Let's take Salad King's Twitter account as a shining example of what to do. They're a Toronto thai restaurant, but they don't just tweet promotional stuff. They use their feed to talk about stuff that matters to their followers, such as local news and culture.
Make a list of things your followers are probably interested in, and tweet about that every once in a while. It's okay.
8. Make sure your avatar doesn't look all pixelated and crappy.
This one's easily fixable. Just use this Social Media Sizing Cheat Sheet by LunaMetrics. Now your Twitter pic doesn't look like an afterthought! Hooray!
So there you go. Eight simple things this organization could do to suck less on Twitter. I wish I could think of something they're doing right to balance things out. All I can think of is...their background image is pretty all right? And...their hearts are in the right place?? Wow, this is sad.
Image via Localism.
Follow @AmandaFactorOMG
