Author: james

A new study from the Association of National Advertisers* highlights that 66% of marketers have now used social media in some way in 2009. This is a massive growth since 1997 when the same survey found that only 20% of marketers used social media 

The top platforms being used by marketers were found to be: 

• Facebook 74%
• Youtube 65% 
• Twitter 63% 
• Linkedin 60% 

Social media (including blogs) is the fastest growing marketing segment. It is estimated social media will be a $3.1 Billion industry by 2014 * The Association of National Advertisers leads the marketing community by providing its members with insights, collaboration, and advocacy. ANA’s membership includes 400 companies with 9,000 brands that collectively spend over $250 billion in marketing communications and advertising. The ANA strives to communicate marketing best practices, lead industry initiatives, influence industry practices, manage industry affairs, and advance, promote, and protect all advertisers and marketers (blurb via Association of National Advertisers).

This guide helps charities increase their outreach / make money from Twitter. Once you have setup a Charity Twitter account it is time to start ‘tweeting’.

1>Answer questions that others have asked. Twitter is a tool to communicate with your audience. Engauge with your followers no matter how big the charity is.

2>Make your tweets interesting

3>Use hyperlinks in your tweets and direct traffic back to a relevant page on your website. (please see previous post)

4>Use twitter to headhunt new job applicants. This could save thousands on recruitment consultant fees.

5>Use a #hashtag’s for all of your charity posts. This will help you gauge the reach of your tweets over time. An example of which may be #DiabetesUK

6>Ask for donations / micro donations

7>Promote your twitter account on your website, blog etc…

Social Media has transformed the way that we commincate with one another. Furthermore this has been the most disruptive element in marketing since the arival of the television. Social media allows brands and organisations to reach their targeted audience and engage with them in a way that relates to them as individuals. When the key goals and objectives have been defined a social media strategist will evaluate these goals & objectives and create a strategy on how best to reach them. Below is a recent video by an American Chap that highlights how social media fits into the world today 

This article has been written in order to teach charities & non profits how to use Twitter.

Twitter has seen a massive increase here in the United Kingdom over the last year.

Twitter is now ranked as the 291st most visited website in the UK, up from a ranking of 2,953. Furthermore the average amount of time that people spend on Twitter has more than trebled from less than 10 minutes a year ago to half an hour now.

Twitter has been taken up largely amongst the young however the fastest growing age group of users is 35-44 year olds, who now account for 17.3% of UK visitors.

The amount of traffic Twitter sends to other websites has increased 30-fold over the last 12 months. Almost 10% goes to News and Media websites, 17.6% to entertainment websites, 14.6% to social networks, 6.6% to blogs and 4.5% to online retailers.

“Top 5 ways charities should effectively use Twitter”

1> Claim your Twitter URL. If someone else decides take your charities twitter URL such as http://twitter.com/wwf it wil be very unlikely that you will be able to claim it back

2> Reskin the background image so it contains your charities logo, brief description and a link to your corporate site.

3> See what people are saying about your charity by using www.search.Twitter.com. Once you have read their tweets befriend them (especially influential news broadcasters, sneezers etc). Such searches take next to no time and if this process is carried out on a monthly bases your network should grow fairly rapidly.

4> Send out “Tweets” (twitter messages) to announce all new news, press releases etc and make sure that they include hyperlinks to your news articles in order to divert users to the charities website.

5> Use www.tiny.url to make your URLs within your tweets shorter. Twitter will usually carry out this process automatically. However on occasions due to human and/or Twitter error this does not occur. Therefore it is currently a good idea to change your URLs manually.

Everyclick (a search engine in many ways similar to Google) donates money to charity each term a user searches for something. We have been working on the Everyclick site for a couple of years now to help assist their SEO, Social Media and Mobile Marketing campaigns.

Everyclick has recently won the “best search and find site” in the “website of the year” awards. We would like to congratulate Polly and everyone at Everyclick for winning the award.

Diabetes UK lobbied parliament with an army of over 200 young diabetics. Over 100 MPs agreed to meet the children and their parents in order to discuss diabetes and the care for young diabetics within the UK educational system.

The day also allowed children meet others their age with the condition and share experiences. A range of games and activities kept everyone entertained from start to finish.

I attended the event in order to send out the Diabetes UK ‘Bendy Bus’ video (via a Nitro Mobile bluetooth hub) and assist with documenting the day.

Diabetes UK Lobby Parliament video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXQuJZXy_qg

Youtube has changed its video player! Videos that have been embedded on websites & blogs now have a Youtube search bar at the top of the video with even more branding.

The player is now ugly and not necessary. If Youtube had to make this change it should only be applicable for newly embedded videos. Videos that fall under Youtube non profits are not exempt. I have advised charities and non profit organisations to embed Youtube videos in the past as the views on Youtube (and many other video sharing sites) help the video to be found within search engine result pages (SERPs)

The main reason why this player should be avoided however is becuase it will encourage people to search for other Youtube videos whilst on your site and drive traffic elsewhere!

If you are a charity, non profit organisation or own a website or a blog do not embed Youtube videos on your website / blog. I would recommend trying Google video, Vimeo or Yahoo, Myspace. You should of course seed your video on Youtube due to the amount of people watch videos on Youtube. However if the aesthetics of your website / blog are important you may wish to reconsider embedding Youtube videos on your site and look for an alternative.

(To see the altered embedded Youtube player in my previous post)