My top 3 tips for charitable foundations using Twitter for digital marketing

One of the things I’m most proud of doing last year was a #BrunchAndLearn webinar with Twitter (watch here). I wanted to share in a bit more detail my top 3 tips for advocacy/NFP organisations advertising on Twitter - one of the things I chat about on the webinar - and some reflections on applying them at the Wellcome Trust.

1 - Engage with Twitter as the platform that it *is* 

It’s a platform for sharing short, snappy content - and that’s sometimes hard for an organisation like Wellcome. We’re a complex organisation working on complicated issues: our instinct is to want to lean in to the complex and the complicated because it’s comfortable and familiar to us.

But it’s difficult making complex and complicated work for marketing - even more so on a platform as concise as Twitter.

And that’s turned out to be a good thing! Because it’s pushed us to distil down what we want to say and to be really clear with the action we want people to take. It’s meant adapting our style to meet Twitter marketing on its own terms rather than trying to hammer a Twitter-shaped peg into a Wellcome-shaped hole.

Twitter isn’t going to change its platform because it doesn’t work for your content (!), so find the best way of using the platform on its terms (not yours).

2 - Find the audiences that will respond to the marketing content

I know, maybe it’s too obvious? But what differentiates digital marketing from traditional advertising is the ability to target your content to relevant audiences.

Twitter has a few different types of targeting options available: for me, the most useful and relevant type for Wellcome has been Follower Lookalikes. We might use, for example, a list of handles of science journalists or a list of Wellcome’s experts like our Director Jeremy Farrar depending on what we’re talking about.

Sometimes we get lucky with Interests or Conversation Topics (e.g. photography for the Wellcome Photography Prize); less often with events - usually because our content calendar hasn’t lined up thematically (something we’re working on).

Whilst the targeting options might not be as granular as, say, Facebook, the principles are the same. Investing time in identifying and testing different audiences will pay off in terms of the actions and engagement you’ll get from them.

3 - Focus on getting people in the right mood/mindset to engage with your longer-form content

One of the objectives of our paid marketing content is driving people to our site, wellcome.org, to read and engage with our longer-form content.

We’re clear that Twitter isn’t the right platform to try and shoehorn in long-form content but we do, ultimately, want them to engage with the long-form content on our site. So our challenge has been to think about what will pique people’s interest enough to click the ad and then spend some time exploring our more detailed site content. And of course doing this without being click-baity or sensationalising serious issues (but also whilst not being boring). 

What’s helped us most is thinking about content as a package, i.e. how does the page content, ad content and organic social content work together holistically rather than focusing on one and then retro-fitting the others into that plan.

Take a look at Twitter’s resources for advertisers here and consider giving Twitter Business a follow for the latest info on upcoming webinars.