Many young nonprofit leaders scrunch up their faces when I ask them if they’re on Twitter. Like, huh? What’s that? When I explain that it’s a free social network that lets you post status updates to the world, they usually suck their teeth and say, “oh, well I do that on Facebook.” “No,” I say, “Twitter is much better than Facebook.” When I say better, I mean in the sense that it’s a better tool for helping you build your personal brand and enhance your nonprofit career. Why? Because Facebook is still mainly just for your friends, while Twitter connects you to anyone and everyone in your field. And the bigger the network, the more opportunities to see and be seen. But let me back up a bit to explain how Twitter works and how you can get started with an account quick and in a hurry. Because you really should. You really, really should. (If you’re already on Twitter, be sure to follow me @rosettathurman!)

What is Twitter?

Twitter has come up with a cool guide to explain what it is and what it does:

Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with others. Twitter lets you write and read messages of up to 140 characters, or the very length of this sentence, including all punctuation and spaces. The messages are public and you decide what sort of messages you want to receive—Twitter being a recipient driven information network. In addition, you can send and receive Twitter messages, or tweets, equally well from your desktop or your mobile phone.

If you’re more of an audio/visual learner, here is a 2-minute video that explains the basics of what Twitter is and what it does. In plain English.

Why Young Nonprofit Professionals Should Use Twitter

Grow your professional network and “meet” other nonprofit leaders from all around the world. Twitter allows you to network with and get to know other nonprofit workers you wouldn’t normally see face-to-face. On Twitter you’ll find fundraisers, people who work at food banks, CEOs, communications professionals, even foundation program officers. You can share information with them, ask them questions and help them with challenges they may have.

Become a nonprofit expert by following thought leaders in the field like @BoardSource (which is an actual organization www.boardsource.org). Boardsource uses Twitter to share timely and relevant nonprofit articles you might not otherwise be aware of. You can also keep up with all the nonprofit news and trends by following @Philanthropy (Chronicle of Philanthropy) and @npquarterly (Nonprofit Quarterly). By having access to nonprofit expertise on a daily basis, you can save yourself a lot of time doing original research or having to subscribe to all the nonprofit journals and weed through information overload.

Build your personal brand and market yourself as a resource in whatever your nonprofit expertise might be. If you tweet about what you know, people will begin to respect you as a professional, regardless of your age.  Plus, it’s easy to get started!

How to Get Started on Twitter

Pick a user name, maximum of 15 characters (no spaces). I recommend using your REAL NAME! Please don’t make it difficult for people to find you if your name is CutiePie1985. Plus, using your real name makes it easier to associate that name with the particular value and expertise you bring online. And really, it’s just the grown-up thing to do.

Learn the Twitter Lingo

Twitter offers a good list of terms you should understand before you start tweeting and get all confused. Here are some of the key words as explained by Twitter:

Following
To receive messages on Twitter, you follow other people and companies you’re interested in—which means you get their messages as they post (put another way, their messages show up in your incoming timeline on your Twitter home page). Conversely, people get your messages by following you.

Tweet
Users refer to an individual message as a tweet, as in, “Check out this tweet about our CEO dancing on the sidelines of the Phoenix Suns game.” People sometimes use it as a verb, too, as in, “I tweeted about the stimulus package this morning.” If “tweet” is hard for you to use with a straight face in a business context, try “twittering” as a verb instead. Alternatives include “post,” “message” and “update.”

@username
One of the most useful things about Twitter is that it lets you exchange public messages with individual users. Simply start a message with @username of the person you want to reach, like this:

“@Ev Glad you liked our vegan cookies. Thanks for twittering about ‘em!”

If Ev is following your account, your message will appear directly on his Twitter home page. (If he’s not following your account, your message will appear in his folder of @username mentions.) People who are following both you and Ev will also see the message on their Twitter home page. Finally, the message will appear in search results, and people who come to your Twitter home page will see it among the messages in your outgoing timeline.

To find the public messages that are directed to you (i.e., those that start with your @Username) or that mention you (i.e., those that include your @Username elsewhere in the tweet), head to your Twitter home page, and then on the right side of the screen, click the tab labeled your @Username.

Tip: To reply easily from the Twitter website, mouse over a message, and then look on the right end for the “Reply arrow”. Click the arrow to start a new message addressed to the original user.

RT, or retweet
To help share cool ideas via Twitter and to give a shout-out to people you respect, you can repost their messages and give them credit. People call that retweeting (or RT), and it usually looks something like this: “RT @Username: Original message, often with a link.” Retweeting is common, and it’s a form of conversation on Twitter. It’s also a powerful way to spread messages and ideas across Twitter quickly. So when you do it, you’re engaging in a way people recognize and usually like—making it a good way to connect.

Shortened URLs
With just 140 characters at your disposal, Twitter doesn’t give you much room to include URL links—some of which are longer than 140 characters themselves. If you post a link on Twitter via the website, sometimes we automatically shorten the URL for you. There are also a number of services—URL shorteners—that take regular links and shrink them down to a manageable length for tweets, and some even let you track clicks.

Start Tweeting!

A lot of young nonprofit professionals are worried they won’t have anything important or useful to tweet about.  That’s okay. When you first start out, you’re going to want your tweets to be a mix of different kinds of posts – info about yourself, interests you have, tips you’d like to share, articles you recommend. As you expand your Twitter usage, your content mix will start to vary depending on what you find useful to yourself and your followers.

The basic content you want to include in your mix are:

• Status updates: What are you working on? What has your attention at the moment?
• Sharing links: Whether it’s breaking news or valuable resources, share links that would be of interest to other nonprofit professionals.
• Have an opinion:  Add your own commentary to those links. Help people get to know you as you share information.
• Ask and answer questions: Google doesn’t have the answer to everything. Sometimes there’s just no substitute for a human being. Ask your followers how to do something, what they think about an issue, etc. Great information comes from the crowd!
• Retweet:  Did someone you follow share something interesting? You can repost it out to your own network by using ‘RT’ atthe beginning i.e. RT @rosettathurman link to new fundraising resources. It’s simple and quick, and it acknowledges the person who sent it out in the first place by giving them a little extra exposure.
• Organizational announcements: Yes, you can directly make announcements about your nonprofit – events, news, etc. Just don’t overdo it.

Got it? For those of you just starting out on Twitter, what’s your experience been like?

Photo credit: Fast Metrics

Up Next: Top 20 Nonprofit News Sources and Thought Leaders on Twitter

I’m blogging every single day this month for 31 Days of Giving to celebrate my 27th birthday on December 31 and asking all my friends to donate $27 to benefit the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network of Washington DC. Will you give? Your gift would really make a difference for young nonprofit leaders in DC!