Social Saturday: Twitter Tips

As you know, this month we’ve been working with Have a Heart, Inc., a no-kill rescue in South Florida, to help them with their social media and to set up a myShelterSite website. Today we’re going to take a look at Twitter for rescues and shelters.

There’s no doubt about it: Twitter is a *great* way to get out the word about adoptables, special events, initiatives and fundraisers. It doesn’t cost anything to have a Twitter account, you can spend as much or as little time on it as you like, and it’s much easier to grow the number of followers as compared to a Facebook fan page.

This week we’re going to look at tips for setting up your account (or tweaking an account that’s already set up) and next week we’ll discuss how to get more followers.

Opening Your Account

• If you’re not already on Twitter, open an account at http://twitter.com. It doesn’t take long and you want to get an account so you lock in your Twitter name. You’ll want to use the same name on Twitter that you use for other social media so you carry your brand through all your accounts. We’re @dogtipper on Twitter and we’re also dogtipper on Facebook. Have a Heart has done a great job with this; they’re @HaveaHeartFL on Twitter and use the same name for their Facebook and YouTube accounts.

• When you select your Twitter name, make sure it’s not too long; short names make it easier for others to retweet (or redistribute) your tweets to their followers without doing any major editing!

Setting Up or Tweaking Your Profile

Spend some time and set up your profile completely; if you already have one, take a few minutes and make sure it’s still accurate and relevant. Your profile will be out there advertising your site 24/7 so this is time well spent.

Go to http://twitter.com/settings/profile and completely fill out your profile info. Here’s a look at the page you’ll see:

• Here you’ll upload your avatar (again, make it one that you’ll be identified with on all your social media accounts).
• Your real name can be your organization’s name, your site name, or your name. It will be displayed. You’ll notice that we made “Dog Tipper.com” two words; this is so the term “dog” can be better searched.
• Fill out your location (we use USA since we aren’t a geographic-specific site); you’ll see @HaveAHeartFL uses “South Florida” for their location since they are a South Florida rescue.
• Use your entire URL so your link will be live. If your rescue doesn’t have a website, consider using your Facebook fan page URL.
• Spend plenty of time on the “bio” portion of your profile; these 160 characters will be searchable words so you want to use keywords that will help people locate your organization. (Check the keyword research for shelters and rescues post we wrote last weekend for tips in choosing keywords.) Here you might want to add more geographic information (“serving xyz counties”) or breed names if yours is a breed-specific rescue.

Choosing Your Background

Twitter gives you several options for easy backgrounds that will work if you don’t have time to make a custom background at first. For example, on our new @CatTipper Twitter account, we selected a plain green background which closely matches the green color used on the site itself. We’ll go back soon and make a custom background but, for now, this helps the account be more closely identified with the site.

You can also upload a custom background. Here’s a good article in Mashable about how to create a custom background for the new Twitter. The article includes some downloadable Photoshop files so you can easily make your own custom background then upload it to Twitter. We used these files to make the background image of @dogtipper which includes a little more info about our site, our book cover, and a background image that can be seen through the semi-transparent right sidebar of Twitter.

HaveAHeartFL has a great background image which includes more about their organization and their account names on Facebook and YouTube.They’ve made excellent use of the left-side space that’s available to them. The only other things they might think about adding to that background someday is their location and the logo used in their avatar to completely bring together all the elements of their brand on the background.

As we mentioned, the Mashable article has downloadable Photoshop files you can use to help create backgrounds. If you don’t have Photoshop or don’t have the time to make a custom background, there are several good resources online for backgrounds. Typically they’ll include the URL of the site that makes the background (often very subtly, though). We’ve used TwitBacks.com for our travel website Twitter accounts and have had good results.

Next week we’ll take a look at how to increase your number of Twitter followers!

About Paris Permenter and John Bigley

DogTipper publishers Paris Permenter and John Bigley are a husband-wife team of full-time writers. The couple has authored over two dozen books and 2,500+ magazine articles.

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