Social Media for Nonprofits

As we’ve discussed in the past, with Twitter, you only have 120 characters to get your message out to your supporters. In our last post, I discussed the importance of ReTweeting, which means that you forward someone’s message to another Twitter subscriber. They then can pass it on even further.

Imagine that you’re in charge of a food drive. You could do a post about how you need canned goods. Having it passed on by so many could be a very effective way to collect a lot of food.

But there’s something you have to remember and when I heard this explained to me the other day, I almost fell out of my chair because it seemed so obvious: Make sure your original message is only about 120 characters long. Why? Because the remaining spaces are needed for people to ReTweet your message properly. If you don’t keep the size around 120, then when they try to pass it on, some of your message will get cut out. That could include some critical info about your nonprofit, like where you want people to drop off their canned goods.

I guess this is an example of where less (characters) is more (impact.)

Additional Resources:

Twitter and Nonprofits