What is twitter and how can it benefit my nonprofit organization? In short, Twitter is a great nonprofit marketing tool.  It is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers, who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Since late 2009, users can follow lists of authors instead of following individual authors. All users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, external applications (notably including those developed for smartphones), or Short Message Service (SMS), although the availability of SMS services varies by country. While the service itself costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees. The website currently has more than 100 million users worldwide.

Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as “SMS of the Internet.” The use of Twitter’s application programming interface for sending and receiving text messages by other applications often eclipses direct use of Twitter.

Twitter statistics:

• Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users
• New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day
• 180 million unique visitors come to the site every month.
• 75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (i.e. via third party applications)
• Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API
• Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day
• Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day
• Of Twitter’s active users, 37 percent use their phone to tweet
• Over half of all tweets (60 percent) come from third party applications
• Twitter itself has grown: in the past year alone, it has grown from 25 to 175 employees

Nonprofit Uses for Twitter:                         

• Social -while at a conference to find better sessions or parties
• Using twitter as a virtual water cooler
• Industry gossip
• Nonprofit marketing
• Pointers to resources, blog posts
• Drive traffic web page/blog or comments
• Ask a question, get an answer
• Get referrals
• Ad hoc collaborations
• Sending reports in an emergency
• Getting news
• Product recommendations while in a store
• Even help create screen captures for presentations!
• Solicitation tool for a fundraising campaign

Hopefully this article will have shown you that Twitter is an increasingly growing social media networking website that nonprofits should be utilizing.  Twitter allows for nonprofit marketing, allowing organizations to get their message across and increase awareness. If your nonprofit doesn’t already have a Twitter page you should defiantly consider creating one. If your nonprofit organization does create a Twitter page, make you remain active on your organizations page to ensure that followers are getting the most updated information possible.