Last year, with the help of Brandwatch, we opened up the People’s Award vote to Twitter, doubling our finalist’s chances of winning, and saw some fantastic campaigns to promote the Award – this year has been no different. To help you along your way, we’ve put together this short guide to making the most of the next three weeks:
Use imagery – Twitter is becoming a much more visual platform, so make sure you’re sharing original images every 3-4 tweets
‘Favourite’ voting tweets – it shows your appreciation
Highlight WHY – pick a handful of reasons why you should win, and why your followers should vote for you
Re-tweet the best tweets – if someone has put together a particularly nice tweet, share it with your followers
And finally, if you’re beginning your tweet with a Twitter handle, make sure you put a full stop at the start, otherwise you’re just tweeting them directly, and the majority of your followers won’t see it.
At our networking event in May, Patricia Webb shared some fantastic tips on how UCanDoIT launched their Twitter campaign, which led to them winning the People’s Award 2014:
1. Engage your stakeholders – they’re the most important people in this competition. These are the people you work with, the people you support and the people who support you.
2. Engage people with your cause. It’s more effective than simply asking them to vote for you.
3. Summarise what you do, and why you do it. Condense it down to four or five words, and this will be your campaign/theme. In our case it was “Getting disabled people online”, which led to “Help us to get people with disabilities online. Pls vote…”.
4. The whole process takes a month. You need to keep people engaged throughout, and to keep re-tweeting. If there are different aspects to your work, choose one per week – or pick four great stories to tell. Make a short video – we used an iPad – or create an image that represents that week’s theme.
5. Decide who does what. Delegate who is running your Twitter account, who is collecting material for the following week, and who is creating imagery or videos, then put it all in a spreadsheet and distribute it amongst your team.
6. To get someone’s attention, tweet them and tweet who they are following. This is the most effective way of getting noticed, and if one of their followers re-tweets you, your cause will be seen again by that all important person or organisation.
7. People are fairly predictable. They check Twitter on their way to work, over lunch and on their way home, and more time is taken to look at tweets over the weekend – especially on Saturdays. To capitilise on this we released our new video every Friday afternoon/evening.
8. Be relentless. If you want to win, expand your contact list, make new friends – and keep reminding people.
9. Good luck!
Thanks to Patricia for sharing her top tips with us – and remember, if you haven’t voted already, visit the Vote Now page and tell us who you think should win the Tech4Good People’s Award 2015, and visit the Finalists 2015 page where you’ll find all the hashtags you need to vote via Twitter. We’re sure our finalists will remind you anyway, though!
