A Guide Women Thrive Worldwide Advocacy Tools & Resources Tweeting for Advocacy

What is Twitter?  Twitter is a “micro blog” that allows users to share content with their followers 140 characters at a time.  Twitter is fast and mobile.  Twitter is an on-the-go and up-to-the-minute resource: many people tweet from their phones, and breaking news can be shared as soon as it happens.  Twitter has a faster response rate than blogs: you can issue a quick 140-character statement about something in the news.  Twitter is a democratic resource.  Twitter allows you to interact directly with all kinds of people, regardless of age, experience, or location.  You can engage with anyone from high-level policy-makers to members of civil society to the public. 2 Women Thrive Worldwide Advocacy Tools & Resources

Tweeting for Advocacy  140 characters is enough! According to PR Newswire, the average length of a press release headline is 90 characters.  Using twitter to meet your advocacy objectives is easy—share your stories, communicate, and interact with policy-makers, other experts, donors, and the public through Twitter.  Tweeting frequently with useful, timely, compelling stories will help others see you as a credible expert in your field.  Tie in your online advocacy with your offline advocacy and projects. Make sure that your tweets are always furthering your advocacy goals. 3 Women Thrive Worldwide Advocacy Tools & Resources

The Feed  Your feed includes the tweets from every person that you follow.  You can see: 1.A link to your profile and your basic information. 2.Users you may want to follow. 3.Trending hashtags. 4.Your feed.  If you see this symbol it means that someone you follow has ‘retweeted’ a tweet.  To follow someone, click on their name, then click on ‘follow’. They will now show up in your feed. 4 Women Thrive Worldwide Advocacy Tools & Resources

The Hashtag #  Similar to a traditional blog, in addition to following specific organizations or people, Twitter allows users to follow a topic – indicated by the ‘hashtag’ symbol.  And because Twitter is completely open, anyone can tag their posts as related to any specific topic – or they can create a new one at any time.  Use the hashtag to include your tweets in tags that users search for and follow.  ‘Trending’ hashtags mean that the hashtag is very popular and is currently being used and viewed by many people. Incorporate trending tags into your tweets to reach a wider audience. 5 Women Thrive Worldwide Advocacy Tools & Resources

The Hashtag #  The hashtag allows you to participate in discussions on any topic you choose: 1.In this tweet, #Uganda is tagged so people who want to read about Uganda can find your tweet. 2.Here, the #superbowl hashtag was used because it was trending and thus the tweet can reach a large number of people following that tag. 3.The #MDIP hashtag is followed by a small number of people in this academic program. The hashtag is used here to include the tweet in their feed. 6 Women Thrive Worldwide Advocacy Tools & Resources

The Hashtag #  You can follow a hashtag by clicking on it and saving it.  Some common feminism, progressive, and other useful hashtags:  #fem2- the hashtag for all things women/women’s rights  #IVAWA- commonly used hashtag for violence against women  #violenceagainstwomen- another common hashtag for violence.  #landrights- commonly used to talk about gender and land rights  #p2- the most common hashtag for US progressive issues.  #girlseducation- all things girls’ education, including in the global south  Remember, you can create a hashtag out of anything.  For example, Women Thrive started #GirlLikeMe for a campaign they created to engage young women around the country on women’s and girl’s issues. 7 Women Thrive Worldwide Advocacy Tools & Resources

The At  All Twitter names (called handles) are preceded by the symbol.  This is similar to your address. You may be and your twitter handle may be  Similar to how hashtags work, you can insert someone’s twitter handle (including the symbol) into a tweet to call their attention. This is referred to as “mentioning.” 8 Women Thrive Worldwide Advocacy Tools & Resources

The At  How to in a tweet: 1.In this first is mentioned so that the tweet shows up in his feed, and people interested in the tweet can go directly to his profile. 2.Here, the tweet links to an article written in Glamour Magazine, is mentioned.  ALWAYS use a ‘.’ before tagging a user at the beginning of a tweet so that everyone can see the tweet.  There is a lot of traffic on Twitter. And because of that, Twitter doesn’t want you to have to see things you haven’t signed up for.  So, when we used the symbol as the first character in your tweet, the only people who see the Tweet are:  People viewing your Twitter feed Twitter feed  The MANAGER Twitter feed 9 Women Thrive Worldwide Advocacy Tools & Resources

The Retweet  Retweeting is the act of sharing someone else’s tweet with your followers.  When your tweet is retweeted by someone, your tweet reaches all of the followers in that person’s feed.  For example:  This tweet was shared with Women Thrive’s 24,020 followers retweeted to 400 followers retweeted to 1,922 followers retweeted to 1,101 followers retweeted to 126 followers  = nearly 27,000 people saw this tweet 10 Women Thrive Worldwide Advocacy Tools & Resources

What should you tweet?  Re-tweet other members of your organization, coalition partners, federal agencies, thought leaders, and credible news outlets.  Live-tweet photos or quotes from trips, events, or panels you’re attending.  Links to compelling news stories or articles with commentary that relates to your organization’s work.  Correspondence with your followers, e.g. thanks for following, answers to questions, survey questions.  Correspondence with influentials, e.g. policy makers, journalists, thought leaders, etc. 11 Women Thrive Worldwide Advocacy Tools & Resources

Targeting Influentials  Find people who you like to follow (journalists, thought leaders, donors) and follow the people they follow.  If you see an interesting article, tweet your comment at them.  If you write a blog or have published an op-ed, tweet it to targeted influentials.  Look for lists. Foreign Policy Magazine, Time Magazine, and other online outlets constantly produce lists of top people to follow. Use them to your advantage.  Share the stories of people on the ground. Your success stories can provide information that influentials may not have access to. 12 Women Thrive Worldwide Advocacy Tools & Resources