Using Twitter to promote a Toastmasters club (Part 2)

A Plan to be Successful on Twitter

If you are going to be successful on Twitter, you need to be more strategic than what I described in Part 1 of this series. If I were to be VPPR again, I would do the following:

First, set your primary objective. You will likely want to use Twitter and other social media to convince people in your catchment area to come and visit your club. To do this, you will need to reach them by doing the following:

1. Audience: build a following in your local area (or internationally if your club does online meetings).
2. Content: send out helpful content to make them want to give you lots of likes, retweets and bookmark your content.

Second, you must understand how Twitter works and realize the enormity of your challenge that faces you. 

• Twitter uses a sophisticated (and ever-changing) algorithm to recommend Tweets to its users based on who they already follow and the topics they follow.
• When you start, you will have almost no followers and no history of producing engaging content.

The crux of the issue is that EVEN if you produce great original content, nobody will see it in the beginning.  Every engagement you earn will be hard-won. You must accept this and plan your campaign accordingly.  

Third, you must understand and strictly adhere to Toastmasters International’s branding guidelines. They have rules about what images you can use and what you cannot.  Understand and stick to the guidelines as you design your event flyers and other assets.

Fourth, ensure you have a good profile. It should summarise what you do, when you meet, where you meet, and how to get in touch. Your tweets (and replies) convince people to look at your profile, but it is your profile (and your history of tweets) that persuades people to follow you.

Fifth, select a tool to manage and measure your efforts. If you are focusing on Twitter, you should consider TweetDeck as it is free. TweetDeck is a social media dashboard application for management of Twitter accounts. It allows you to schedule content ahead of time, so you won't have to remember to tweet your Wednesday content on that day. If you are spreading your efforts across several social media platforms, you will want to consider another platform. There are several that offer limited free plans.

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Planning | Part 3: Content Strategy | Part 4: Audience Building