Post by Gemma McNeil-Walsh

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises

If you were to ask me what my most useful resource during a three-year undergraduate development studies degree has been, I think the answer might surprise you: Twitter. Although I initially joined Twitter so that I could join in on my housemates’ banter about cupcakes and Ryan Gosling (don’t judge), I quickly found Twitter to be an invaluable professional and career development resource. I decided to leave the Ryan Gosling banter to Facebook, the pictures of cupcakes to Instagram, and came to see Twitter as a ‘rolling online CV’.

Through Twitter I have been approached and invited to a coffee meeting to discuss a new business venture; I’ve been recruited for freelance work at a national newspaper; and I’ve been sent a film that I went on to screen at my university. My housemate (also a development student) even connected to a journalist at the Guardian through Twitter, and was interviewed for an article that was published on the website. While I am by no means a social media expert, I thought I would share here some top tips on getting the most out of the Twittersphere.

1. Get your profile right

It needs to include the serious stuff (such as your current degree or place of work etc.), but don’t forget to make yourself sound human (put in one of your other interests or a quirky fact about yourself). See examples here.

2. Don’t just retweet

It’s important to inject some of your own voice into your Twitter feed, so don’t just rely on retweets or on tweeting out links or article headlines (although obviously do that too) – aim for something like 70% pure retweets, 30% tweets that you have either written yourself or altered.

3. Live-tweet

For me, the best way to interact with people or to gain followers has been to live-tweet from events, conferences, talks and panel discussions. Jump on the event hashtag, tweet some of the best things the speaker is saying, and make sure to interact with other people who are tweeting from the event.

4. Research hashtags

Make sure you only use hashtags that you know other people are already using. Don’t go making up bespoke hashtags à la Instagram (#yolo #internlife #unayyy). Before using a hashtag, click on its feed to make sure it’s active – basically, you want to make sure it’s worth using some of your precious 140 characters on. Talking of hashtags, the Guardian Global Development Professionals Network (@GuardianGDP) tweet out a daily hashtag (#hashtagoftheday), which is always worth checking out. Another important point is to limit how many you use – more than five hashtags significantly decreases the likelihood of someone interacting (clicking on, favouriting or sharing) with your tweet.

5. Watch what you tweet

If you imagine your Twitter page as a rolling online CV, you automatically become more aware of what you allow on to your feed. There’s nothing wrong with Tweeting comments of a more personal nature (it makes you a more interesting person), but being too controversial or offensive is only going to draw attention to your feed for the wrong reasons.

6. Follow academics

This one is probably a little biased given that I am technically still a student, but there are some academics who are very active on Twitter and who are well worth following (try Laura Hammond and Chris Blattman for example). Of course, make sure to tailor this to your own area of interest so that the issues they are talking about, or the research they point you to, is relevant.

7. Get favoriting!

Twitter can often be an overwhelming space of information, so the ‘favourite’ button is a really useful tool. Use it to bookmark anything that you see that may be of interest or of use, but which you want to come back to later. When I’m writing essays or preparing for exams, I often stock up on these resources and then go back through them to find what might be most relevant.

8. Don’t be afraid to engage

Twitter is much like the real world – people like to interact, and they like to know your reactions and opinions on things! They also love a good complement. So if you’ve read, or seen something that you liked – post it on Twitter and say what you liked about it (making sure to mention the original source). Even if people don’t get back to you on it, they’ll likely appreciate you for making the effort to Tweet about it. Similarly if people post questions, or shout-outs, on Twitter – reply to them (but only with something useful). That’s how my housemate got interviewed by the Guardian, and how I ended up contributing to this blog!

9. It’s another skill to add to the CV

Many entry-level jobs in development organisations are likely to be in PR or communications positions, and if you can showcase that you are an active user of Twitter you are automatically in a stronger position. If you think that your Twitter feed is a good reflection of you both as a person and as a potential employee (or let’s face it, intern), don’t be afraid to include the link on your CV. It will give people a unique insight into you – one that can’t be achieved on LinkedIn or on a two-page Word document.

If all of this seems like a lot of effort, I promise it tends to be worth it. For me, Twitter has been an equal playing field – despite being a lowly development undergraduate, Twitter has given me a platform to engage and interact with the development community and has brought my degree to life in a way that I don’t think other resources could have done. There are so many ways to get the most out of Twitter, and these 10 tips are just the beginning – please get in touch if you have more to add!

Quick links to get started on Twitter:

• Development Intern’s list of good accounts to follow (including: academics, bloggers, development news sources, job opportunities & our writers)

• WhyDev’s list of globaldev allstars

This originally appeared at DevelopmentIntern.

Gemma McNeil-Walsh is completing her undergraduate degree in development studies & economics at SOAS in London, and heading to the Oxford Internet Institute for her MSc in October. Interested in media, communication, Internet and ICTs on the African continent, she works in digital newspaper production, interns with SOAS Radio, and has spent the previous two summers working in Freetown, Sierra Leone on documentary and citizen journalism projects. Follow her on Twitter at @gemmcneil.

The post 9 tips for using Twitter to tap into #globaldev community appeared first on Socialbrite.

Print out this cheat sheet to keep tab on the top tags

During the holiday break, Socialbrite is updating and republishing one of our most popular posts from last year.

By Kim Bale
Socialbrite staff

Sending a tweet into the Twitterverse without a proper tag is like stocking a library with no regard to author or subject matter. Your messages may go unread and opportunities to connect with others may be missed.

Make room for a hashtag in your post. That will add your tweet to an existing thread, given that Twitter now turns hashtags into links. Bottom line: When used strategically, hashtags are definitely worth the precious extra characters.

We wrote earlier about how nonprofits can use Twitter hashtags. But hashtags have evolved a bit since then. Download and print out our new 45 hashtags for social good flyer so that you always have the right tag ready for your tweets.

What’s a hashtag? Our social media glossary says this:

A hashtag is a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. Similar to tags on Flickr, you add them in-line to your Twitter posts by prefixing a word with a hash symbol (or # sign).

How to create your own hashtag

Hashtags are useful when discussing a specific topic, trying to reach a certain demographic, aggregating tweets about an event or trying to raise awareness of a cause. Twitter now creates a link whenever anyone adds a hashtag — click it (say, #cause) and you’ll see a thread of most recent tweets that contain the same tag.

Anyone can create a hashtag. Just affix the # symbol to the beginning of a word, tweet it — and you’ve got your #hashtag! A hashtag can be included anywhere in your tweet — in the beginning, middle or at the end (though generally the latter). It doesn’t matter if the hashtag is uppercase or lowercase.

If you’re holding a conference — for example, #12ntc — or a special event or tweet regularly about a specific topic, you’ll likely want to use a hashtag. Be sure to announce the hashtag in advance so your followers will begin to use it. Need help with a fundraiser you’re organizing? Tag it with #fundraising and it will appear in a thread like this:

How to find the right hashtag

How to choose the right tag? Start with our flyer, then visit to search.twitter.com, type in the hashtag and see how other people are using it. You can also go one step further and search the hashtag on an analytics website, like Trendistic, What The Hashtag or hashtags.org, to see how it’s trending over time. This will clue you into which hashtags are most popular and which hashtags you should avoid because they see more action than the freeway at rush hour — say, #politics.

Note: You can’t add any punctuation to your hashtag, so it’s #web2, not #web2.0.

Can’t find the right hashtag for your tweet? Create your own. Just remember to keep it short and recognizable so others will use and search it. The longer your hashtag is (say, more than 10 characters), the less likely other people will be to retweet it.

Before you create your own, check out these existing hashtags for social change and start a conversation. Have your own favorite, or spot something we missed? Please add in the comments below!

Social change & activism

1. #socialgood: This hashtag can be used to discuss any topic related to social good. Closely related: #socialchange.

2. #cause or #causes can be used to discuss subjects related to social causes.

3. #volunteer, #volunteers and #volunteering all seem to be equally popular when talking about or looking for a volunteer opportunity.

4. #4change: This hashtag was created to flag a monthly chat on how social media is helping to foster change.

5. #video4change is used to feature successful and creative video advocacy examples.

6. #giveback: Use this hashtag to talk about giving back to the world and your community.

7. #dogood: Support the movement to do good and share your good deeds with the world.

8. The Occupy movement uses these hashtags: #OWS, #occupy, #occupytogether, #occupywallst, #occupywallstreet and #OccupyEverywhere, along with local variations like #OccupyOakland. (See Occupy Wall Street: The fight for the future.)

Nonprofits & foundations

9. #nonprofit: This versatile tag can be applied to any tweet concerning the nonprofit sector (and is somewhat more popular than #nonprofits).

10. #nfp and #notforprofit: Similarly, these can be used interchangeably for discussions about not for profits.

11. #philanthropy: Tag your philanthropic news with this hashtag.

12. #charity: Mark your charitable tweets with this hashtag, or the slightly less popular #charities.

13. #charitytuesday: Share your favorite nonprofits with your followers every Tuesday.

14. #nptech: Use this for tagging nonprofits’ use of technology.

15. #foundation or #foundations when discussing news about foundations. In the same vein: Use #grant to reference all things grant related.

16. #crisiscommons: This hashtag is used largely during disasters to create crowdsourced solutions that contribute to disaster relief, along with the hashtag specific to the disaster.

Social businesses

17. #socent: Use this tag to discuss social entrepreneurship.

18. #impinv: Use this to discuss impact investing.

19. #crowdfunding: For discussions of enterprises and projects funded by the crowd. Closely related: #crowdsourcing.

20. #socialbusiness: Use this to refer to business working toward social good.

21. #changemakers: Use this when discussing change through social entrepreneurship or when referring to Ashoka Changemakers.

22. #BOP (Bottom of the Pyramid): A favorite among entrepreneurs, this can be applied to a variety of tweets from topics concerning frugal spending to untapped resources. Be aware, however, that this hashtag gets a lot of use by those outside of the nonprofit sector. The related #bopbiz might be a better choice.

23. #entrepreneurs: Great for connecting with talented entrepreneurs.

24. #csr (Corporate Social Responsibility): Use this for tweets about sustainability and corporate programs to serve the public.

25. #microfinance: Use this when discussing microfinance or extending financial services to the low-income sector.

26. #socialenterprise: Use this to discuss how business or organizations are using marketing strategies to achieve social good.

27. #socap: For use when discussing social capital. (The tag for next month’s Social Capital Markets conference is #socap10.)

28. #sofinance: Use this for discussions on social entrepreneurship and finance.

29. #neweconomy: Yes! Magazine set this up for people to share ideas around alternative paths to economic growth.

Environment, social justice & human rights

30. #humanrights: Use to discuss human rights or oppressive actions taken against individuals.

31. #poverty: Use this to start or join a discussion about poverty.

32. #hunger: Discuss subjects related to hunger.

33. #aid: Discuss financial or humanitarian aid.

34. #diversity: Discussions about diversity in the workforce and in the culture.

35. #sustainability: Discuss topics related to sustainability.

36. #health: For use with tweets related to health. Another popular tag is #healthcare.

37. #sdoh, short for social determinants of health.

38. #disabilities: Related to people with disabilities.

39. #green: This popular hashtag relates to the green movement and, more broadly, environmentalism.

40. #eco: This hashtag is focused on improving the environment (and, really, #environment is too long a hashtag, though it’s still popular).

41. #earthtweet: Share what you and others are doing to keep our planet healthy.

42. #humantrafficking: Use to discuss human trafficking and modern-day indentured servitude.

43. #climate: Discuss subjects related to climate change (global warming). We like the shorter #climate over the longer but still popular #climatechange.

44. #solar: Discuss the benefits of, or questions about, solar power.

45. #fairtrade: Discuss subjects related to the fair trade movement.

And, of course, #ff (follow Friday) never goes out of style.

What else you got?

Related

• How nonprofits can use Twitter hashtags (Socialbrite)
• Twitter tutorials: Twitter Lists, hashtags, Twitter stats & more (Socialbrite)
• Measure your performance & influence on Twitter (Socialbrite)
• Best Twitter dashboards for nonprofits (Socialbrite)
• Build a fan base: How to get more followers on Twitter (Socialbrite)

The post 45 hashtags for social change appeared first on Socialbrite.

Learn how Twitter can help you make the most of your next conference

This is part of our series on how nonprofits can get the most out of Twitter and the first in a series of guest posts from content partner Movements.org.

Guest post by Susannah Vila
Movements.org

Whether you are hosting an event such as a fund-raiser or a conference, or you are signed up to attend one, Twitter can help you to expand the event’s reach, grow your organization’s audience and connect with potential collaborators or partners.

One effective technique is to take advantage of Twitter’s viral power during an event or conference — your own or someone else’s. Here’s a 12-step guide on how to live-tweet an event.

1Choose a hashtag or find the hashtag that the organizers have picked. It should be short so that plenty of characters are left for the content of your tweets. People generally put the hashtag at the end of every tweet about the event. This way, anyone following that stream will see your posts and identify you or your organization as part of that event.

Tip: You don’t need to be at an event to join in on the hashtag stream. Many people follow along from a livestream and use the hashtag to share their thoughts, or point out memorable insights, to those who are both attending the event or watching remotely.

Tip: Which tool will you be using to engage with the Twitter conversation during your event? TweetDeck on your laptop? Twitter.com? Use TagDef to find out what a hashtag means.

2Pay attention. It may seem obvious, but the whole point of tweeting from a conference or other event is to choose the statements made by speakers (or people asking questions) that are the most interesting to your followers. Not everything said at a conference is worth repeating, so don’t bother with platitudes and instead just highlight those thoughts that come out of the live conversation that strike you as worth thinking more about or worth relaying to your audience.

3Know your audience. When at an event, it’s never a bad idea to remind yourself of who your audience is and how this event fits with their interests. If they are following you because you or your organization focuses on one issue in particular, then they will probably be expecting your tweets to relate to that topic. When choosing which ideas and comments to bring into the Twitter conversation, check with yourself to ensure that your tweets will be relevant to your followers.

4Use attribution: A big part of tweeting from a conference or other event is about curating the most relevant and important points that speakers make and sharing them with your followers. If someone says something interesting, use a format like “[name] says [their statement].” Whenever you can, use the speaker’s Twitter handle to attribute a statement to them — this allows an interested follower to immediately see their bio, picture and website. If you can’t find the Twitter handle right away, just search Google for “their name” + “Twitter.” Make it as easy as possible for your followers to identify who’s speaking — you don’t want to run the risk of people taking a statement or idea out of context or simply getting confused by your tweets and unfollowing you.

5Use rich media. Add context to your tweets by including multimedia in your tweets. You can link to websites that speakers are mentioning or even take a picture or video yourself (using Twitpic on any smartphone). If the speaker mentions a paper or a video, then you should open another tab, search for that item and link to it in your tweet.

6Link back to your earlier tweets. It’s likely that you will tweet an idea two days in to an event that relates to something that a speaker (or you) said the day before. If this happens, visit your Twitter profile (www.Twitter.com/yourusername) and look for the correct tweet. Click on the timestamp (i.e., “17 hours ago”), and then copy the URL of that tweet, shorten it and share it within your newest tweet.

7Follow others during the event. A benefit of tweeting from an event is that you can gain a large amount of quality Twitter connections in a short amount of time. Just as people will see your Twitter handle in the event’s livestream, discover your work and follow you if it is relevant to them (which is likely since you are both paying attention to the same conference), you should follow other people whose handles appear in the livestream. This simply increases the chances that other event-goers will discover you and you can make connections that overflow into offline meetings.

8Keep the conversation going. Watch for statements that triggered interest among your followers or that many people in the event’s livestream retweeted. To the extent that it’s possible, reply to those who tweeted the same statements, either agreeing that an important point was made or by asking a follow-up question of your own. If the conversation gets interesting, you can tell everyone who is at the event to take it offline by tweeting something like, “Let’s talk more about this during the coffee break in the main lobby!”

Tip: Start the day with a fully-charged laptop, smartphone or iPad. Bring extra battery power and/or a charger!

9Bring in diverse viewpoints. Chances are that someone will be live blogging the conference as well. This means that they will be recording more of what is said and in more detail. Look around — for instance by glancing at the hashtag stream — for live bloggers. After vetting them, share the links to these blogs with your followers. It’s a great idea to give your audience different perspectives on the event.

10Follow back other live-tweeters. People will invariably see your tweets in the event’s hashtag stream and follow you because of them. Look through your newest followers and make sure that you have followed back everyone you might be interested in staying connected with. They can’t direct message you (for example to get your e-mail address) if you don’t follow them back.

11Reconnect with your new followers by sending a “thanks for connecting at [event name]” tweet once the event is over. Part of tweeting from an event is about using the platform to make connections that can last beyond the event or even grow into organizational partnerships and collaborations.

12Take note of the most interesting conversations that occurred on Twitter during the event and use them for a blog post later on. Your audience is likely to be interested not just in your general take on the event but also in the interactions you had with other event-goers. An easy way to do this is to “favorite” the tweets that you saw in the event’s hashtag that struck you as the most concise or interesting and then reprint these tweets in wrap-up blog post.

Tip: You can also use Twitter search to go through the hashtag-laden content and look for more interesting nuggets after the event is over. Tools like WTHashtag.org and Twapperkeeper lets you create an archive for a Twitter stream and download it directly to your computer so that you can look over the items more closely later or identify who an idea or tweet should be attributed to.

Tweets are supposed to be casual and off-the-cuff rather than perfectly formed ideas, so have fun and don’t overthink it!

PHOTO AT TOP BY Steve Jurvetson

The post 12-step guide on how to live-tweet an event appeared first on Socialbrite.

On Tuesday I’ll be leading an online session for Philanthopy.com about building communities on Twitter (follow @Philanthropy for details).

Communities do not just happen. And they certainly don’t happen overnight. You have to have something important to talk about. And you have to be prepared to consistently connect people together over a period of months.

But Twitter seems like a big mess, doesn’t it? With thousands of tweets going off every hour, about hundreds of different topics, how do you build a cohesive group of fans?

The answer is hashtags.

Hashtags are a way to funnel specific discussions about a topic into a coherent thread, sort of like using Twitter to tune into specific radio frequencies. But not everyone knows how to create successful chat sessions.

In the screencast at top, I outline the basics of managing a hashtag chat on Twitter:

• How to use TweetGrid (one tool among many valuable tools)
• How to create a hashtag
• How to avoid missing replies to you within a chat
• How to find and invite others to your chat
• The importance of a landing page for your chat

Kudos to @ShareStrength for their excellent example!

How have you used hashtags successfully?

Photo by kbaird on Flickr.

Reposted from JohnHaydon.com.

The post Using hashtags to enhance community appeared first on Socialbrite.

Photo by Mansikka

Tips on how to facilitate conversation around a tag

What is a #hashtag?

A hashtag is the symbol: #. (See the definition in Socialbrite’s glossary.) It is also a Twitter term that describes a keyword, prefixed by that symbol, that helps people track conversations on Twitter.

The hashtags site, a centralized directory of hashtags on Twitter, also offers a good definition:

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

A brief history of hash tags
Chris Messina is credited with starting hashtags and has written about how to make them most useful. According to the Twitter Fan Wiki, hashtags were popularized during the San Diego forest fires in 2007 when Nate Ritter used the hashtag “#sandiegofire” to identify his updates related to the disaster.

Nonprofit use #1: Events and conferences

Since those early days, hashtags have been used in different ways by nonprofits. One of the most frequent applications has been to use them at events and conferences. It’s not uncommon to see the “official” hashtag included with the promotional information about the event, even events or conferences that are not technology focused.

The hashtag creates a backchannel for participants. It also makes it easy for attendees to follow the conversation thread and participate whether they are or in the room or following from afar. That’s, of course, if the tag used is unique enough.

Nonprofit use #2: Sharing knowledge/resources as community of practice

Hashtags can create an ad hoc community of practice or a channel for people in a field to informally share resources or conversation.

Tagging communities or unbounded networks that might come to life around a tag are not new. The nonprofit technology community has used a special tag, nptech, created by Marnie Webb in 2004. It still continues to be used on Twitter as well as other places. Although this was before Twitter, the advice about what makes an effective tagging community still resonates and are applicable to effective Twitter hashtags

There are many ad hoc Twitter hashtags where nonprofits, foundations, social entrepeneurs, and others are sharing resources or having conversations. Some occur on a regular basis. I don’t think there is a formal directory of nonprofit hashtags, but there are few terrific blog posts that have good lists. For example, Socialedge compiled a list of Twitter users in the social entrepreneurship sector that included a list of hashtags.

Given that hashtags seem to appear and disappear like Cheshire cats and most seem ephemeral, a massive directory of hashtags for nonprofits is probably not very useful. However, a list of the 10 best hashtag communities and conversations might be.

Some of the #hashtag communities are ongoing and unstructured like the #nptech tag community. Others are more formal, structured conversations that happen weekly at a particular time. #4change is a regular chat about social media change. Another example, although not totally nonprofit focused is #blogchat, which is facilitated by @mackcollier and uses wthashtag to aggregate the conversation.

In my initial analysis of a mega list of 90 Foundations that Tweet, I did not look at hashtags. Nathaniel Naskashima, in a comment on another post, shared some insights from his look at the hashtags used by Foundations on Twitter. He observes that the hashtags are general, not unique.

As you can see, most of the #hashtags listed above are really way way too general to be of any use. If for instance, you tagged a tweet about your Foundation’s performing arts program with #arts, your tweet would be amongst tweets about all kinds of topics in the art world – even tweets about Paula Abdul leaving American Idol. If, however, there was a standard #hashtag for philanthropy/non-profit art like #philart (stands for philanthropy art) or #npart (stands for non-profit art), then I think we would see everyone in this industry getting a lot more out of Twitter (e.g. engaging in conversation, finding it more useful as a social media tool).

I think it takes more a unique tag. You need to publicize the tag and encourage conversation around the tag. Also, having weekly summaries that can be shared in other mediums can make the information accessible to others who don’t want to participate on Twitter. For example, the #givelist tag aggregated all the suggestions from Twitter and then created this site. This takes some facilitation.

Nonprofit Use #3: Advocacy channel

Hashtags can be used effectively at different rungs on the ladder of engagement. The best example of educating and engaging is how the National Wildlife Federation is using the #nwf hashtag to engage its audience in watching wildlife.

Another example is their use in a policy debate. EDF has put together a Twitter Guide to the Climate Bill Discussion. The guide points out the hashtags used by people who are supporting the bill or against. It also provides some “tweeting” points for advocates to use. And, in the case of Twitter Vote Report Twitter hashtags have been used for real-time participatory democracy.

• What other uses of hashtags by nonprofits are there?
• What are the lessons learned for using them effectively?
• What are your best resources about hashtags?

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