While nearly all association executives are at least somewhat familiar with Twitter, most associations have yet to embrace this emerging social networking platform as a means of outreach to the constituencies they serve. In many cases, the perception of Twitter is that it is a tool used by teenagers and young adults to transmit messages regarding social plans or to gossip on various topics. While in some cases, these perceptions are accurate, Twitter already has proven to be a smart social networking platform for many forward looking organizations.
Twitter’s Demographics
A few statistics should demonstrate the importance of considering Twitter in your member outreach strategy and will also dispel some of the more common misconceptions regarding the platform:
- According to a recent Nielsen survey, Twitter is by far the fastest growing online member community. Twitter has grown from one million unique visitors in June 2008 to nearly 21 million unique visitors in June 2009. This far exceeds the growth in other social networks during this timeframe and only includes users who access Twitter via the main twitter.com website. Many users leverage applications like Tweet Deck on their computers or mobile phones. Twitter reached a penetration level of 10.7 percent of all active Internet users in June 2009.
- Another survey dispels the notion that Twitter is mainly used by teenagers and young adults. It appears that only 16 percent of Twitter.com users were under the age of 25 in June 2009. 64 percent of Twitter users are between the age of 25 to 54 and a surprising 20 percent of Twitter users are over 55.
- It appears that the simplicity of Twitter’s 140 character updates and the lack of more sophisticated social networking features such as posting videos and other content leads younger people seeking a more advanced platform to use Facebook rather than Twitter. By contrast, the relative simplicity of Twitter seems to be attracting older users who may be intimidated by more fully featured social networking platforms.
Ideas for Leveraging Twitter
If teenagers and young adults aren’t using Twitter to plan this weekend’s party, then who is actually using this platform? How can an organization hope to sift through all of the noise in order to find relevant information?
People from all walks of life have taken to using Twitter to broadcast their activities. A surprising number of members of Congress use Twitter to communicate with constituents and to link to relevant content on the web. Business executives such as Jack Welch post personal and business content on a frequent basis. Celebrities, journalists, and ordinary people are interacting in ways that were not possible just a couple of years ago.
All of this is interesting and sounds like it could be great fun, but how is it relevant to associations? The most intriguing aspect of Twitter is the fact that most messages tend to be made on a “spur of the moment” basis and are generally unfiltered. Think of Twitter as the equivalent of an online water cooler where you can listen to the stream of consciousness thoughts of relevant individuals. Here are a few strategies worth considering:
- Monitor Twitter feeds using important keywords that are relevant to the organization. This could involve the association’s name, acronym, or industry specific words and phrases.
- Keep up to date with the Twitter profiles of important members who carry significant influence within their industry or profession.
- Assign staff members to proactively communicate with individuals who are seeking information on the profession or industry. This is a great way to grow membership over time since it builds awareness and involvement within the community.
- Monitor Twitter comments that might be critical of the organization or expose frustration. Similarly, monitor compliments and consider “re-tweeting”, or re-broadcasting, relevant content.
- Establish an organizational profile on Twitter and begin to follow relevant individuals and posting relevant content to your Twitter feed. Over time, your Twitter profile will attract followers. The network effects of Twitter will really take off once your profile has a significant number of followers.
Assuming that you are sold on the concept of using Twitter, how can this strategy be effectively implemented? Surely you do not want to assign staff members to monitor huge streams of Twitter feeds each day hoping for the occasional relevant tweet. In my next blog post, several approaches for productively monitoring Twitter will be discussed. In the meantime, follow me on Twitter by clicking on
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