This Guest post was sent in by Angela the Corporate Relationship Manager for  charity-interview.html" class="contentpagetitle">@Childrens_Trust and represents a snap shot of their use of Twitter, a great read and very informative:

TCTTlogocmykcopy

Twitter is a free social networking and 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 your profile page and delivered people who follow you (Followers) .

Twitter is ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide.  In February 2009 Twitter had 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits.  Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382 percent, and Facebook with an increase of 228 percent

Why The Children’s Trust use Twitter

  • Raise awareness
  • Drive traffic to our website
  • Promote events
  • Build communities of support,
  • Get supporters to fundraise,
  • Engage with volunteers, campaigners and other stakeholders.

Twitter and The Children’s Trust : The Children’s Trust started to twitter 7 weeks ago and already have 1140 followers. The great news is that Twitter has become our number one referral site to our website in June with 164 referrals    

The Children’s Trust Tweets

I tweet about 5 times a day and have we been Tweeting about a variety of things including
  • Sports events – runs, walks, treks always linking to our website and using www.tiny.cc to create a short url
  • Special events – community events  pop icon , golf day
  • Stories about the children – Tommy, Ollie and Alby
  • Press articles
  • What children have been up to – trips out etc
  • Lottery , charity shops
  • Asking people to follow us on Followfriday or Charity Tuesday

Offers of help on Twitter in last 7 weeks

  • Halliday books donated book for our children and signed books for raffles and author coming to visit children and take part in illustrating / writing workshop
  • Sports Masseur in North London donated prizes for Insurance Ball, Opera Evening and happy to donate other prizes
  • Magic man coming to do free show for our children
  • Volunteers offered to help at events
  • Nursery World Magazine are going to feature National PJ Week
  • 2 other parenting websites going to adopt The Children's Trust and promote PJ week
  • www.freshties.com are promoting us on their front page of their website
  • 2 people have signed up for the lottery
  • I person applied for our half marathons
  • I person offered to be a Plinth volunteers
  • Little dish donating prizes for events and talking to them about CRM

Celebrity Twitter Followers

  • Jenni Faulkner – now thinking about the Royal Half Parks too
  • Richard Madely
  • Yoko Ono
  • Terry Wogan
  • Gail Porter
  • Maggie Philbin
  • James Caan

Key Twitter things to remember

  • Although it’s a social networking tool, we need to apply the same caution with regard to use of photos and children’s details as we would when dealing with the press.
  • Needs to be on-brand at all times, and though it can be more informal than much of our printed communications, we should still maintain good editorial standards
  • Be informative and link to our website . Do not tweet about same thing too many times and do not just talk about events
  • Respond to people and ask questions but do not add any personal opinions or be too chatty
  • Always always check and count to ten before you tweet
{jb_bluebox}Thank you to The Children's Trust for sending over this fantastic look at their use of Twitter and some of the internal thoughts on how they are approaching it.{/jb_bluebox}