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Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, businesses, brands, bloggers, social media managers, individuals.

This is the part of our ongoing series on how organizations can get the most out of Twitter. Please check back weekly for the next installment, and see below for other installments in this series.

By Lindsay Oberst
Socialbrite staff

Twitter has become an increasingly vital tool for businesses and nonprofits of all sizes. Now that you’ve had a chance to get more familiar with the social media platform, build up your following and even measure your level of influence against other organizations, it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty of using Twitter. We’re talking Twitter apps, people. There are hundreds of Twitter apps that exist, and rather than weed through them by trial and error, we’ve compiled a list of 10 apps we recommend to help nonprofits get serious about getting results with social media.

CoTweet: Proactive marketing solution

1 CoTweet is a powerhouse for Twitter accounts when you have multiple team members tweeting. It allows for scheduling, tracking and adding notes. Nonprofits can manage up to six Twitter accounts for free using the Standard edition. The ability to track past conversations is a great utility to remind you where you stand with each contact. You can also assign specific people to on-duty status. The Enterprise edition costs about $1,500 per month and is worth it for medium to large organizations. With this edition, you can manage campaigns, assign tasks and integrate the tool with third-party apps such as Salesforce.com. On the other hand, the interface is lacking and the analytics could be better. It also allows for Facebook management.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile

MediaFunnel: The app for team tweeting

2 Media Funnel allows for more of your staff to be involved with the tweeting process. It supports multiple user types — admins, publishers, contributors and guests — and tweets can be placed in a queue for editorial review by a publisher or administrator. Scheduled tweets, brand alerts and tweets via email or SMS are supported. This tool also integrates with Salesforce.com, Zendesk, Twilio and Klout. The free plan allows for two users and no brand monitoring, while the standard plan offers many features and costs $1 per user per month or $1 per social media account, whichever is greater.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Desktop, iPhone, Android, Blackberry

Timely: Make your tweets count

3Timely analyzes your past 199 Twitter updates to determine what times during the day people are most likely to read your posts. You can schedule tweets to go live at those times and can use the bookmarklet to tweet links without leaving your current page. You can tweet right away or add the message to your queue. It’s free.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Klout: Measuring online influence

4 Klout offers a daily summary of your organization’s or team members’ social media influence, with a ranking that factors in your reach and impact on Twitter (metrics such as retweets, follower counts, list memberships, unique mentions), Facebook and LinkedIn. Klout has an open API that’s integrated into many Twitter apps: More than 750 partners use Klout data, including Hootsuite, CoTweet and Attensity 360. For the end user, its analytics platform is rich and easy to use, even if the methodology used in spitting out a Klout Score is a bit opaque.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based, iPhone (Social Score), Android

Twylah: Branded pages for your Twitter account

5Twylah creates one page that sums up your nonprofit brand. This custom page automatically organizes your tweets into topics that you tweet about most often. Users can interact on your page by retweeting and responding to messages. The biggest benefits this tool brings are for SEO. Google no longer indexes tweets, but it does index each Twylah page and the tweets within it, giving your tweets a longer life. It also offers PowerTweets, which creates a separate landing page for your tweets with other recommended messages. It’s good to use this for blog posts, but if you do it too much, you might annoy your followers.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Qwitter: Find out who unfollows you

6Qwitter lets you know when someone stops following you after your last tweet, so you can identify what might have made them unfollow you. This free tool automatically e-mails you when someone unfollows you. If you’re a nonprofit and you tweet about sports and then three people immediately unfollow you, you might want to keep your messages more on topic.
Rating: ★ ★
Platforms: Web

LiveIntent: Cultivate your following

7With its Discovery Window, LiveIntent lets you turn static social media Follow Us buttons into dynamic windows on your site. The start-up says the intent is to grow your following and fans, while improving SEO and driving additional revenues from “sponsored introductions,” which are based on common interests and level of engagement. The window dynamically adjusts recommendations for each user and each page.

Rating: ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Twitpay: Send and receive money via Twitter

8Twitpay is a simple, secure way to enable your supporters to make donations to your cause and to quickly spread the word. It’s free to use use, however, it does charge a percentage of the donations actually paid including a small fee per transaction. They say they have over 45 nonprofit clients including CARE, the National Wildlife Federation and the Children’s Miracle Network.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Optify: Marketing solutions for the real-time web

9Optify is robust business management tool that lets you set up real-time alerts to track specific keywords and provides useful insight into your social media activity. You can create and track Twitter campaigns, and it gives insight into how well visitors from Twitter convert into leads. Optify also offers many other optimization tools to find keywords, improve your website and more. The free edition only allows for one user and tracks five keywords. The basic version costs $99 per month and allows you to track up to 250 keywords. The professional version is $500 per month and allows for 10 users and 2,000 keywords.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

JustCoz: Increasing awareness about your causes

10 An online relay system built for charities and nonprofits, JustCoz gives Twitter users the ability to donate a tweet a day to help raise awareness for causes. Once someone signs up, a tweet will automatically be sent from their account once per day with your customized message. This tool can help raise awareness for a campaign, however, all messages go out at once and you only have the option to send the same message to all of your followers.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

What other Twitter apps or tools have you found useful for your nonprofit?

In this series on Socialbrite

• 8 nonprofit Twitter superstars
• 12-step guide on how to live-tweet an event
• 24 best practices for nonprofits using Twitter
• 7 top tools to measure performance & influence on Twitter
• Best Twitter dashboards for nonprofits

The post 10 great get-down-to-business Twitter apps for nonprofits appeared first on Socialbrite.

JustCoz, Twibbon, Google Docs were among tools used for community engagement

Guest post by Amy Sample Ward
Membership Director, NTEN

Every campaign, every organization, every individual engaging with others online has a set of tools and techniques they’ve learned from and rely on every day. Building community and maintaining engagement is often a full-time job – even if it goes unpaid.

Epic Change is no different. The To Mama With Love campaign saw them try some new tools as well as some trusted favorites, even with no budget and lots of volunteer time.

Twitter is a major part of Epic Change campaigns and their daily engagement plan. To Mama With Love is no exception – but, as Stacey Monk, CEO of Epic Change, reflects, “It’s a much different medium than it used to be.”

Two or three years ago, you could have a conversation out in the open and have people organically join in. It’s much more challenging to do something like that now. The 2011 To Mama With Love activity on Twitter was driven primarily by people very close to the campaign, whereas the first Tweetsgiving was driven by people Stacey didn’t know yet or hadn’t invested time cultivating relationships with.

More than 180 people with over 635,000 total followers signed up to participate by authorizing Epic Change to post via their Twitter account using JustCoz, an online relay system that lets you donate a tweet a day to help raise awareness for causes that matter to you.

While there were a few instances of serendipity – where notable JustCoz participants like prominent technologist & entrepreneur Jeff Pulver (who has over 400,000 followers) were retweeted by followers like Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior (who has nearly 1.4 million followers) – Stacey points to the difficulty in getting people to join in the conversation on Twitter.

Some messages sent by Epic Change via their 180+ JustCoz participants would get zero response — from over 635,000 total followers. “No one seems to be listening anymore,” Stacey said.

By comparison, when Epic Change launched the original TweetsGiving in 2008 – when Stacey herself had far fewer followers & the Twitter ecosystem itself was exponentially smaller – the campaign generated over 3,000 tweets in just 48 hours.

Twitter should be used for cultivation, not broadcasting. Stacey uses it for one-to-one personal connections. She explains that when they first approached Twitter, they thought it would be a way to amplify voices of people who weren’t being heard. Now it seems like no one will be heard.

JustCoz: Relying on focused engagement

Twitter was thought of separately than JustCoz for just this reason. Focused engagement, with direct messages, replies and retweets, required a different process and purpose than broadcast messages.

The limitations of JustCoz include the ability to send messages only once every 24 hours (meaning, at least 24 hours must pass between messages), messages go out through all authorized accounts at once (there’s no option to stagger posts) and you have only one message (there is no segmenting).

In Stacey’s opinion, the most helpful tweets are the ones written authentically from the first person. You can’t do that when you’re mass-tweeting.

Stacey and her team thought JustCoz could be a good way to get people involved and start generating buzz before the site actually went live, and then maintain some messaging throughout the campaign.

How did it go? Well, like much of social media, it depends on the message. Here are a few of the examples:

• When we asked people to join by tweeting, because it was easy and different, we went from 20 to 180 people who had signed up to let us tweet through their accounts.
• When we tweeted with the ask “write a love note,” we generated more responses to that during the campaign than actual campaign messages.
• We thought we could generate a conversation but it didn’t happen. That may have been because the “tweeter” of the message wasn’t aware that they’d tweeted anything, so couldn’t carry on the conversation. Stacey offered that it would be helpful if JustCoz participants received a direct message any time a message was sent from their account.

Twibbon, Pitch Engine and blogger outreach

Epic Change also incorporated Twibbon into the To Mama With Love campaign. Supporters simply connected their Twitter profile with Twibbon on the TMWL Twibbon page, and the tool updated the Twitter profile picture of the user with an overlay that included the campaign logo and hashtag. According to the Twibbon profile for TMWL, 667 users added the badge to their pictures.

In addition to Twitter, two volunteers created separate press releases about the campaign on PitchEngine to spread through their networks. Stacey does feel that it’s a useful and simple tool that can help spread your story, but had there not been volunteers in the public relations industry involved in the group, she may not have made the time to use the platform.

When it came to blogger outreach, a Google Doc was the preferred and successful tool. They were able to update it at any time with all the information necessary to reach out to, orient and support bloggers spreading the message about the campaign.

The first TMWL campaign used a highly customized WordPress site. To incorporate the level of functionality and customization they wanted for the 2011 campaign, Epic Change recruited a volunteer developer to redesign the site in PHP.

They did not have a preference in mind for the redesign when it came to the programming language, just a clear understanding of what they wanted supporters to be able to do. That directed the build. PHP was selected because that’s what the developer volunteering to contribute the tremendous amount of work and hours was most comfortable with.

The team had about six to eight weeks of development from mock-ups to live site. But, again, that was with incredibly capable developers passionate about the work and campaign. In most cases, it should be noted, the process would take longer. An important contributing factor to the speed at which they could build the site was their clarity around what they wanted and needed; they never changed their minds or redesigned aspects during the process.

Bit.ly was another major infrastructure component, Bit.ly is a URL shortener that allows you to track your links across social media as well as customize the shortened link. Epic Change had an organizational account and almost always gave a URL they were using in email, Facebook or Twitter a unique URL that matched the content or ask. Especially when it was a URL to pages they would reference often, like the sign-up pages to join the volunteer team, creating the shortened URLs helped them share easily while making it easy for supporters to share appropriate links, too.

The third part of the TMWL infrastructure was Radian6, a social media monitoring service. Radian6, which was acquired by Salesforce on March 30, sponsored the campaign by providing Epic Change with free access to the monitoring tool. This allowed Stacey and the team to have real-time access to detailed metrics, making it possible to revise the messages & tactics on the fly.

Manymoon: Project management app connects to your Google accounts

Planning tools abound, especially for small teams looking to use a Web-based tool to keep everyone connected and informed at any time, from anywhere. Epic Change used four planning tools, but much of the work was really in just two: a private Facebook group and Google Docs.

With the intention of using a project management tool to be organized and purposeful before the campaign, and during, Stacey set up the team with Manymoon, a project management application that connects to your Google apps/Gmail accounts. Stacey felt it was a great tool, but they didn’t use it effectively. Furthermore, asking volunteers to master a tool that’s not entirely intuitive — that’s the biggest fault with most every project management tool on the market — is a stretch. Ultimately, Manymoon was helpful for putting the plan together between Stacey and Sanjay. They will look for another tool to use next time specifically for site development planning.

Stacey found that what they were trying to do in a project management space wasn’t really project planning, but organizing the volunteers and volunteer opportunities. As such, creating Google Docs let them have varying levels of privacy for different documents – some were intended to be shared publicly, others with just the team and so on – as well as update content easily and in real time. Some of what they used Google Docs for included:

• A new form for supporters to sign up for various missions
• Information for bloggers
• Information about the campaign and how to get involved

To make the Google Docs even easier to share, Stacey created custom URLs for the pages using Bit.ly.

The bulk of the communicating, organizing and planning – both before the campaign launched and during – was carried out through the private Facebook group. Stacey was already participating in private groups to have an idea of the functionality and options and found private groups could be really engaged – especially because of the functionality and layers of notification settings that Facebook provides across the platform.

One aspect they were dissatisfied with about the Google Group from the 2010 campaign was the broadcast feeling of the emails, often resulting in Stacey being the only one to start a conversation or share a message. On the flip side, they found the Facebook group allowed for people to start their own threads and conversations. This wasn’t because of any difference in permissions between the two platforms but because discussions in Facebook’s groups are all visible and non-linear, whereas email can often lead to conversations getting muddled or people reading and following without responding.

Using both Facebook and Google for groups

Stacey struggled with the decision to commit so much time, energy and focus on Facebook during this campaign because of the ethical questions around the site’s practices regarding personal privacy, data sharing and so on. They had a lot of conversations around whether they wanted to be in there; they knew there were people who would have participated but do not want to be on Facebook. It was a difficult decision that meant people would be left out.

Despite the downside, they do want to nurture the group that formed there in between campaigns and get people involved further ahead of time for the next campaign. Ideally, though, Stacey says she’d like to see something that is equally useful and easy to use, but that will allow everyone in. She’d like to have the option of choosing both utility and ethics.

Since the Facebook group kept most of the supporters and volunteers engaged throughout the day with updates, idea sharing and feedback, the Google Group was used mostly for major updates to ensure that important announcements made it through to everyone involved. Since Facebook’s notification settings can be set to receive no email updates from groups, Stacey felt it was important to send periodic updates through the Google Group as a supplement, even though it was not very good for conversation. She thinks they may move to MailChimp next year.

Because it is a fundraising (and love-sharing) campaign, it could be argued all of the tools are fundraising tools. But, as for specific technologies used for transactions, there were just two: bitcoin and PayPal.

Representatives from bitcoin, a peer-to-peer currency exchange, reached out to Stacey before the campaign. Epic Change decided it could be an interesting way to allow for donations, so they added it to the TMWL site. Ultimately, only one person used it. Since it does not require extra work or management by Epic Change, they may continue to offer it for their campaigns and measure any growth in interest.

PayPal was the the workhorse, as it managed all of the donation processing. PayPal offers reduced fees for 501(c)3 organizations and is a flexible tool for donors (not requiring a PayPal account, for example).

Have you used any of these tools? Please share your questions and your experiences!

Related

• Plant the seeds of hope wherever you can (Socialbrite)

• 5 lessons from a crowdsourced birthday party (Socialbrite)

• Why you need to share your story (Socialbrite)

The post Lessons learned from the To Mama With Love campaign appeared first on Socialbrite.