Using Twitter and Facebook to Promote Your Issue

Instead of using them just to be able to say "We're on Twitter and Facebook!" There are so many ways to use social media as popular as Twitter and Facebook are around the world to your advantage but not without a strategy. Treat Twitter and Facebook like any other aspect of your campaign: set goals, plan, act, and then evaluate.

The concept of using social media in campaigns is not a new one. In fact, in the dawn of the internet, the "Aryan Resistance" attempted to use online groups to spread their message and gain supporter. To read their frightening yet surprisingly useful tips for social media, visit DrDigiPol.com.

Some of the useful advice we can take from the "Aryan" strategy are:

1. Seek out other groups with similar goals/messages and connect with them, share your org's ideas
2. "Create posts that are succinct and self-sustaining." Man, were they right about that! You don't have much time to get/hold people's attention, so keep it short, clear, and informative.
3. Post often and a lot. When using social media platforms, your group or page must look active and exciting. It is also nice if you respond to all individual comments made on your page, so people feel involved in the cause.
4. When someone joins your group or "follows" you on Twitter, contact them! As the extremely helpful DigiActive Guide to Twitter Activism reminds us, we should not direct message users when they follow us on Twitter, since the direct message is a rarely used, special function on this site. Keep it casual, tweet at the new user, welcoming them and giving them some info or a link to your Web site/upcoming event, something to let them know how to get more involved if they so desire. With Facebook, you can post on their wall or simply invite them to an event with a personal message etc.

DigiActive's Guide to Facebook Activism has some great ideas on how to most effectively use Facebook for a causes, the best of which I will list here:
1. Make your group page interesting and update frequently. Post multimedia and links to your page and invite group members to do so as well. Since people don't spend too much time on any one Facebook page, keep your group description succinct, and update it with the most relevant news and the few upcoming events every week or so.
2. Invite users to comment and listen to their ideas. If you get some good contributions, highlight them in messages or on the group page to encourage other submissions and to let your members know this is their organization.
3. Make your plan for Facebook and then ask your members to help in every part of the process. Facebook groups are an eclectic bunch, so chances are you'll have people who can build media lists in various cities, people who can design flyers, write press releases, post in blogs, or recruit lots of other members. Use them!
4. Since Facebook is used all over the country and the world, encourage group participation in event-planning, etc. If you want members to organize protests in their respective cities or college campuses, allow active members in those areas to customize the events the way they think will best attract attention and gain followers and then invite them to share multimedia and feedback on how the events went.

DigiActive's Guide to Twitter Activism is a great tool to get more familiar with Twitter tools and language and also offers these great activism tips:
1. Use the hash tags (#) in your tweets to attract traffic to your page, and encourage your followers to hash your cause/group name to also direct people to your initiative.
2. Since Tweets are tiny and not the most informative, use Twitter to direct people to the videos on your YouTube channel, the events and activities on your Facebook page, the news articles you have on Digg, or the new content you have on your Web site.
3. Twitter is great for "swarm intelligence" and "collective action." If you tweet a hashtag (#) for Healthcare protest photos (#healthcare_protest_photos), at the end of the day you can search that tag and get an entire user-generated history of photos. It is also great for spontaneous collective action or real-time updates since many use Twitter on their mobile phones.
4. Find and connect with other activists on Twitter. Follow them, re-tweet them, and start the conversation that could lead to a joint-event, some member crossover, or maybe just an interesting idea/cause to share with your followers.
5. Keep track of twitter activity with a Twitter desktop application: http://twitter.com/downloads.

Have your own tips or experiences using social media for activism? Comment them here!

DigiActive is also a great resource for ongoing tips and information about using social media.