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Chapter 7

Applying the T.W.E.E.T. Framework

There is no magic bullet to excelling on Twitter, but there are clear, measurable ways to reach success. In this chapter we'll look at applying the entire T.W.E.E.T. model. By practicing the five key steps in the framework, we will see exactly how the model works to help organizations succeed.

Case Study 1: Inua

Inua is a fictitious non-profit organization based in Nairobi, Kenya, that works to provide important services to pregnant, HIV-positive women who are facing extreme poverty. Inua, which means “uplift” in Kiswahili, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that is registered in Boston but operates in ten women's centers throughout Nairobi. The centers house mothers during their pregnancies and in the months following; staff work on a case-by-case basis to help their clients. In addition to meeting the ongoing health needs of the women, education is a critical aspect of the curriculum in Inua's women's centers. Inua requires that all expectant mothers housed in the centers take courses to learn important skills to become better mothers, as well as pursue job-training classes to teach them to provide for their infants upon leaving the center. Inua also takes an active role in helping women with job placement and ongoing health issues for a period of two years after leaving the centers. The staff of Inua is composed of seven staff members based in Boston and over forty local staff in the ten women's centers. Inua receives most of its funding from private donors in the United States and has received several major multiyear grants from large foundations.

Inua had been on Twitter for three months when they realized they needed to concentrate on developing a real Twitter strategy; they had sent only a handful of Tweets during that time. For all intents and purposes, they felt they were making a fresh start when they decided to employ the T.W.E.E.T. model to get going.

Target

The first step for Inua was to identify the Target for the account. Of the three main account Targets (information, personalized, fundraising), Inua was able to make a definite decision without too much difficulty. They chose a personalized account for a few reasons. First, when Inua had decided to begin using Twitter, they determined that the current staff member focused on communications (the director of communications) would be adding the role of Twitter strategy and management to her already full plate. As a result, Inua staff had concerns about the amount of time they could devote to Twitter, and they worried about their abilities to keep up with the (slightly) more demanding Target of being an information account. Additionally, fundraising on Twitter was not a present priority for Inua. Like most non-profits, they certainly needed funds, but they were currently the recipients of a large three-year grant, and they also had three annual events that raised significant funds for their organization. Based on time concerns, and for lack of an immediate fundraising goal, Inua decided to make their Target a personalized account.

They then identified five goals they hoped that this Target would help them reach within six months of implementing their strategy on Twitter. Although at first they were worried that all their goals were not measurable enough, they were confident that some of the clearest gains they could reap from Twitter would be more qualitative ones, so they wanted to include these in their list. Their five goals were

• To build a healthy following for the @inuaorg Twitter account so that when they sent an important Tweet, they could count on feedback from regular supporters. Although Kara, the director of communications (and now social media manager as well), knew that this was a somewhat “fuzzy” goal, it was one of the most important to her in identifying whether Twitter was working for Inua in their attempt to connect.
• To create a system whereby tweeting and managing the Twitter account takes no more than three hours a week. Kara knew her time was limited, and she calculated this was what she could devote to Twitter management.
• To make sure that more individuals in the community know about Inua's annual March walk-a-thon at the nearby high school, which typically raised more than $60,000 for the organization each year.
• To make international donors feel closer to the Kenyan women's centers and to give daily glimpses into life in the Nairobi centers.
• To draw more readers to Inua's blog, which featured local staff's video interviews with women in the Inua centers each month. In general, the blog was able to provide about four quality pieces a month (including a video interview), but its traffic was quite low, as the only current driver was the Inua monthly email newsletter.

Inua next mapped their organizational goals for the following six months alongside their Twitter Target. The March walk-a-thon was clearly a campaign they needed to involve Twitter in, and they worked on developing a specific campaign Target of fundraising for this particular effort while still sticking to the overall Target of having a personalized account. Although this might be a challenge, Kara felt that she had a naturally personal voice that would make it easy for her to tweet about fundraising activities and direct requests for funds while maintaining the account's personality.

Write

With their Target in place, Inua next focused on getting down to the business of Writing. Although the social media manager, Kara, was excited about the personalized account Target, she did worry about the exact parameters of potential Tweets. What was too personal? Could she tweet about her commute? Her long holiday weekend? Trying to dive in without thinking too much, she began tweeting once a day while at work, retweeting and @replying multiple times a day, and sometimes scheduling Tweets for the weekends if she wasn't sure she'd be near a computer or on her mobile. She kept the material for the Tweets she scheduled focused on items that weren't time-sensitive or that didn't talk about being in the office if it was a Sunday, for instance. The following were the main types of Tweets that made up the @inuaorg timeline:

• Personal Tweets from Kara talking about what she was doing that day in the office, or (sometimes) on the road when she travelled to Kenya
• Personal Tweets from other staff members (only on occasion) that talked about their work from @inuaorg
• Tweets talking about new efforts that Inua was undertaking from Kara's point of view
• Individual @replies
• Tweets highlighting new content on the Inua blog
• Lots of retweeting—typically of Tweets written by two similar organizations operating in Nairobi that Inua regularly worked with

Engage

At first, the engaging step came quite naturally to @inuaorg. Many of Inua's early followers were existing supporters who had already been on Twitter and were happy to see Inua embracing the platform; in the first few weeks they sent a flurry of @replies and direct messages to @inuaorg. Early engagement was very high, and Kara was pleased to see that with only a small following she was able to get good feedback quickly when she tweeted something out.

She was worried, though, about her existing donors and supporters getting bored once the novelty of Inua's entry onto Twitter had worn off, so she wanted to reach out to attract new followers. She set up a notification for every time a new follower followed her and then immediately followed them back, often even sending out an @reply immediately to thank them for their follow. Notably, though, she didn't set up an automatic reply. (I remember my first day at Twitter when I sat down next to Kevin Thau (@kevinthau) in business development. I told him my handle; he followed me, and then gently told me that my automatic @reply was a bit spammy. He was right.)

She saw an increase in followers, and when she put a note in her bio “@inuaorg will follow you back!” she saw a further spike. Soon, though, she was spending a lot of time sending @replies to new members. She had also started receiving irrelevant @replies that had nothing to do with Inua, and the levels of spammy @replies were rising as well.

Explore

Inua was doing a couple of things to optimize their search for new accounts and influencers on Twitter. They had a regular dialogue on Twitter with two organizations in the Nairobi area they had worked with in the past, and Kara read the Tweets of these other two organizations religiously and retweeted them regularly. She also had automatic searches set up for terms like “Kenya” and “HIV/AIDS,” but she hadn't found them very effective in leading her to new ideas. Mostly she just felt overwhelmed by the wealth of information coming in through these streams, and she frequently found herself spending too much time reading about a new AIDS awareness project in India, say, that had nothing to do with Inua. Honestly, time was a problem for her. She was spending so much time engaging with current followers that she didn't have many resources to devote to searching for new angles that Inua might explore on Twitter. Although she knew this was a concern, she couldn't see a way to fix it.

Track

After six months of engaging in their new Twitter strategy, it was time for Inua to evaluate how far they had come. The first step was to look back at the five goals they had set for themselves and see where they stood now. Here are each of their original five goals compared with their current progress:

Building off Kara's initial thoughts after reviewing the progress Inua had made so far on the five six-month goals, she then dove into some of the other metrics in the categories of Write, Engage, and Explore.

Metric: Write

When faced with the long list of potential measurement points in the Write metric, a few stood out to Kara immediately as areas particularly relevant to the @inuaorg account:

• Best Tweet
• Worst Tweet
• Percentage of Tweets with media links
• Percentage of Tweets with photos

Without even doing any calculations of the number or percentage of Tweets she was sending with media links to video or photos, Kara knew it was very low. At the same time, she had seen again and again that her “best Tweets” were the ones that directed followers to watch the video of the month at the Inua blog. Putting these two facts together, she realized that @inuaorg simply had to start sending out more media, and had to do so in a way that also reached its aims of increasing blog traffic and letting overseas supporters feel more in touch with Inua's work in Kenya. In efforts to reduce the amount of work she would be taking on, Kara decided that a weekly photo feature was the way to go. The photo would be posted on the blog, increasing the number of monthly posts on the Inua blog from four to eight, and it would help serve all aims. It also wouldn't be hard. Inua had a backlog of amazing photographs taken over the past few years that could easily be used. Although photos were not as powerful as video, it was a good start. To make it easier on her, she also needed to set up an automatic RSS connect so that new blog posts would immediately get tweeted, without her having to remember to do so.

In looking at the category of “worst Tweet,” Kara recalled that there had been a few times in the past six months when she had received particularly bad @replies in response to Tweets she had posted. Although the @replies weren't outright rude, they all suggested the same thing: Who cares about you waiting in line at the post office, Kara?

At the same time, Kara was looking at the actual numbers of Tweets (and the weekly averages) that the @inuaorg account had been sending out. In taking a good look at her Tweets over the past six month, Kara eventually realized that she had simply gotten too personal. In her efforts to not overedit herself, her Tweets had becoming increasingly irrelevant to Inua's work, and they were also increasingly frequent. Although she had once tweeted once a day, she was now easily tweeting three to five times a day, and sometimes about (gasp!) what she was eating for lunch.

It was clear that she needed to begin editing her Tweets more and begin focusing on trying to make really powerful, personal statements. Additionally, it was time for her to create her own (very) personalized account. She obviously liked Twitter and the chance to share her thoughts with the world, but @inuaorg was not always the right place to do so. To reduce the few times that other employees were tweeting semi-personal messages from the @inuaorg account (making readers even more confused), she asked the rest of the Inua employees to set up personal Twitter accounts and to keep their Tweets on those streams. To help get @inuaorg back on the right track, and to remind followers what the account (and the organization) was all about, she also set up a monthly scheduled Tweet that simply explained the work of the organizations to new followers.

Metric: Engage

Analyze what was retweeted, when, and why

• Number of retweets about your organization
• Most engaged day of the week
• Most engaged time of the day

Although some organizations focus too much on the number of retweets they are getting, Kara had clearly focused too little on this metric. No one was retweeting most of what she was saying, because most of it was not terribly connected to Inua and was a bit too personal for her followers' liking. If Kara focused more on a goal of getting retweeted, she would probably start crafting better Tweets. She decided she needed to start jotting down her ideas for funny and interesting Tweets that still gave a sense of Inua's work even when she was offline. When she logged on, she could look at this list and pick a good one, instead of saying whatever (bad) Tweet came to her in any given harried moment.

When faced with looking at the days and times of most engagement on the @inuaorg account, Kara came to another startling conclusion. Aside from @replies (which sometimes were irrelevant), the biggest problem she saw with her engagement was that her followers seemed present, and liked to @reply, but for the most part they weren't really engaged in anything. They were there, waiting and listening, but she wasn't asking them to do anything. To fix this, she decided to start a weekly question with its own hashtag: #upliftaids. By sending out a specific question related to Inua and to the larger global issue of HIV/AIDS, Kara hoped she would be able to focus her followers' engagement on a productive meme, or weekly feature. She experimented, using questions like “How much does a year of ARV treatment cost in the USA compared to Kenya?” Along the same lines, she realized she had to become more proactive about asking for engagement. She vowed to scan through her follower list to find individuals who looked like they had a big reach and to specifically ask them to retweet certain messages.

Metric: Explore

Kara's idea about asking influential followers to retweet her messages brought up another question: Did she even have many influencers to reach out to in the first place who were already following @inuaorg? To explore this a bit more, she evaluated a couple of key areas:

• Number of lists following (lists your organization is following)
• Number of lists created (lists your organization created)
• Size and growth of lists created
• Number of influencers actively on to-follow PR list
• New relationships created

When Kara looked at the list of potential metric points to better understand how she was doing on the Explore step, she knew she had a lot of work to do. Inua needed influencers, and she simply had to make this a priority in the next six months. She saw that she was spending all her time interacting with existing followers (some of whom were hardly quality followers at all). Although it is important for non-profit organizations to not ignore their loyal supporters, Kara had taken this to an extreme. She was tweeting in a bubble (and sometimes in a bubble with spammers); she needed to branch out. She immediately set a goal for herself to spend all her allotted Twitter time for the coming week using the tips in the Explore chapter (Chapter Five) to look for relevant influencers, follow them, and create public (and private) lists of them as necessary. She knew that the support of a true Twitter influencer could be one of the biggest wins for the @inuaorg account, and she decided once and for all to give this task the time it deserved.

She also knew there were other areas of exploring that demanded attention. For example, she needed to search more regularly for mentions of @inuaorg. Kara was sure she had set up an automatic stream searching for mentions of Inua on Twitter, but she couldn't find it to save her life; she assumed it had gotten deleted during one of her frantic days of @replying thirty people who probably had only questionable interest in Inua. She put this on her list of must-dos. Her list didn't end there, though; she knew there was a lot in the area of exploring that she had to do. She wanted to find a role model non-profit organization account to follow; another good step would be to apply for Twitter's pro bono Promoted Tweets for Good at Twitter's Hope140.org.

Although it had taken some time to truly evaluate the @inuaorg account and what it had accomplished in the preceding six months, it had been a productive exercise, and Kara felt much clearer on what needed to be focused on next. Using what she had learned, she drew up a list of five goals for the next six months, largely related to refining her tweeting and ensuring that the majority of her time was spent engaging with true influencers. In this way, she hoped to move forward.

I created the fictional organization of Inua to represent many of the modern concerns of non-profit organizations wanting to make a difference on Twitter. This case study addresses many key issues, including the following:

• Inua is international. Inua reminds readers that non-profit organizations around the globe can use the tools in this book to excel, and that success on Twitter is not dependent on proximity to Silicon Valley.
• Inua does not have a large following. @inuaorg shows how you can gain just as much benefit from Twitter as some of the mega-organizations with millions of followers.
• Inua juggles many concerns all at once. This case also brings up multiple issues regularly facing organizational accounts, including fundraising, active volunteers, multimedia tweeting, blog and website traffic concerns, conveying sensitive information, and invoking personality in Tweets.

Ultimately, Inua represents a non-profit organization working to make an impact via Twitter without massive resources. Many readers of Twitter for Good will identify with their strong mission, limited means, and occasional feelings of overwhelm on their journey.

Now let's look at another example of how we can use the T.W.E.E.T. model, this time in a cause-driven, for-profit setting.

Case Study 2: Viva

Viva is a large Latin American television station based in Caracas, Venezuela, that hosts a variety of daytime and evening programming. Apart from talk shows, news programs, hosted variety shows, and game shows, Viva is most known for hit soap operas (telenovelas). Caracas is a hub for the telenovela industry, and of all the products Viva produces, telenovelas are the most widely translated and distributed to other television networks throughout the world. A twenty-five-year-old organization, Viva has nearly six hundred employees in eight countries. More than half work in Caracas.

Although Viva has always been involved in giving back to the local communities, the past five years has seen a formalizing of the company's charitable work under the arm of the Fundación Vivir Bien (Live Well Foundation). The small foundation has one full-time staff member whose primary role is to coordinate an annual one-month healthy living campaign that provides donations to third-party non-profits centered on healthy living. This staff member works extremely closely with the rest of the Caracas-based Viva staff to create a packed month of charitable activities that include a live televised music concert to raise funds from the general public, airing of dozens of public service messages filmed by high-profile actors and actresses at Viva, and the airing of a short documentary explaining how the work of the previous year's campaign was able to positively impact local healthy living initiatives in Latin America. Historically Viva has funded the campaign itself, but in the past few years it has begun to broker deals with snack food companies promoting healthy products via Viva on-air talent during the campaign. These outside funds allow Viva to create a broader television awareness campaign and provide more direct aid to the non-profit beneficiaries.

Although Viva is a high-profile TV station in Latin America that many individuals talk about on Twitter, the organization has done little proactively to take the reins of Twitter themselves and truly direct their own strategy. About a year ago, Sol, the social media manager based in Caracas, signed up for Twitter with the account @vivaviva and encouraged two colleagues (one in Mexico City and one in Madrid) who dealt with marketing in those regions to also sign up as @vivavivamx and @vivavivaes. To date, these are the three semi-official Viva Twitter channels that Sol is aware of. However, many individual employees have their own accounts, as do a host of the individual actors, actresses, and hosts affiliated with Viva.

In applying the T.W.E.E.T. model, Sol knew she would have to streamline many of these different accounts, and she wanted to get started.

Target

First, Viva identified its Target. Sol focused first on finding a Target for the main account, @vivaviva.

Of the three main account Targets (Information, Personalized, Fundraising), she was able to easily decide on an information account. The company simply had too many individuals involved (not to mention a public relations team still getting used to the idea of Twitter) to make a personalized account viable. Plus, as a TV station with more than forty weekly programs and dozens of well-known Latin American actors, the one thing they never lacked was information. Because the focus of the campaign was more on awareness than on fundraising, a fundraising account was also not their top choice.

Viva (with Sol taking the lead) then identified five goals they hoped this Target would help them achieve within six months of implementing their strategy on Twitter:

• To create a database of all Viva-related accounts, including accounts that represent Viva's individual television shows, individual talent accounts, general Viva accounts, and all personal staff accounts. The goal would be to not only track these, but also to ensure that these accounts were provided with reliable messaging to help support the healthy living campaign.
• To streamline the “main” Viva accounts by eliminating impersonation accounts, inactive accounts, and otherwise nonessential accounts so that the main Viva handles had clear owners and goals. Each of these main accounts then needed a plan and a schedule to ensure it was providing the relevant information required for both Viva as a television station and Viva's healthy living initiative.
• To provide Twitter training to staff and talent, and to find a balance between suggesting best practices to Viva-related employees when tweeting and not restricting their individual expression.
• To bring Viva's Twitter presence on-air, and to do so through the healthy living campaign. Although many other TV stations had begun incorporating Twitter, Viva had been slow to do so, mostly because of their late arrival on the platform.
• To create individual Twitter accounts for each market devoted to conveying show times and market-specific information.

Mapping Viva's goals for the healthy living campaign next to their Twitter target, they knew that the healthy living campaign would remain present throughout the year, but would have a particular focus during its one-month push—when it would take precedence on the @vivaviva account.

Write

Although it was clear to Sol that Viva should certainly be an information account, her first challenge was in trying to decide what kind of information should go into the @vivaviva Twitter stream. The sheer quantity of information was overwhelming. There were forty programs a week to (potentially) talk about, and dozens of actors and actresses—many with their own Twitter handles. Trying to dive in without thinking too much, Sol began tweeting once a day while at work, retweeting and @replying multiple times a day, and sometimes scheduling Tweets for the weekends if she wasn't sure she'd be near her computer or mobile. She kept the material for the Tweets she scheduled focused on items that weren't time-sensitive, or that didn't talk about being in the office if it was a Sunday, for instance.

Engage

When a large brand comes on Twitter for the first time, their experience is very different from that of a small organization. Instead of working to make a name for themselves—and trying to start a conversation—their task is to engage with the conversations already under way. @vivaviva didn't need to carve its own space on Twitter so much as it needed to find the niche it had already been allocated, and then start speaking up. Given the nature of @vivaviva as a television station with many high-profile actors, Sol quickly found that people were talking about Viva all over Twitter. As an information account, she saw her role as one of providing quality, “official” information in the many settings where people were already talking about Viva, Viva programs, or Viva actors and actresses. To do this, Sol had to remind herself frequently to make sure her interactions accurately reflected the brand that Viva had crafted over the past twenty years.

Another issue Sol faced was the amount of interaction she saw that the fans wanted. As soon as @vivaviva became active on Twitter, even more fans came out of the woodwork, and Sol couldn't keep up with the flurry of @replies, direct messages, and hashtags directed at @vivaviva. Sol realized that, as an information account, @vivaviva didn't need to interact with everyone; rather, her job, given her Target, was to create valuable, fresh information that made fans feel connected—even if she couldn't connect with everyone individually.

Explore

When @vivaviva first implemented the T.W.E.E.T. model, the best they could do on the Explore step was simply to find and keep up with the massive amount of information already out there on Twitter about the company, their actors, their television programs, and their healthy living initiatives. Although Viva hadn't been active on Twitter for the past few years, others had been actively tweeting about them—and they needed to make sure that they were following these conversations to help better manage their brand.

Track

After six months of engaging in their new Twitter strategy, it was time for Viva to evaluate how far they had come. The first step was to look back at the five goals they had set for themselves and see where they stood. Here are each of their original five goals compared with their current progress:

Through this process, Sol had also found out how many of the healthy living campaign sponsors were already on Twitter. This made it easy to have talent mention their Twitter handles and the handles of the brands or products they were promoting online, and it created an instant offline connection between the viewer and the healthy living campaign. Throughout the course of the campaign, Sol was able to work directly with their major sponsoring brands and beneficiary non-profits; she had a custom Twitter background designed to reinforce the image of a united front on Twitter.

Sol then began to look at some of the other metrics within the T.W.E.E.T. framework steps of Write, Engage, and Explore to get a complete sense of what they had learned in their first months of implementation.

Metric: Write

In terms of Tweet crafting and creation, Sol immediately identified these metrics as relevant in terms of the success of @vivaviva:

• Response to different types of Tweets
• Percentage of Tweets linking to the organization website
• Existing memes

Like Kara and @inuaorg, Sol decided that @vivaviva needed to take better advantage of the ability to use media in their Tweets. Although it would take some legwork to ensure that all the on-air public service spots the actors and actresses filmed for the healthy living campaign could go on the Viva website, Sol knew this was crucial. With these clips—and with much of their other on-air content—@vivaviva had the potential to rally followers around a video that they hoped would go viral. Because they're a TV station, video was their huge asset, and they simply weren't engaging with it on Twitter as much as they could be. Encouraging videos in Tweets would have the added result of sending more people to the Viva website to watch even more.

Sol also was looking for ways to increase Viva's efforts to connect live tweeting of on-air talent, tweeting of viewers, and the @vivaviva Twitter account. She decided that creating a Viva-specific meme on Twitter would be a good idea. With something like #vivamejor (“live better”), Sol could encourage the various television programs, actors, and actresses to not only use the hashtag on their Twitter accounts when mentioning ways to live more healthily, but to also talk about the hashtag on-air. It would pull together the on-air and off-air Twitter elements and spark greater engagement with fans during the healthy living campaign.

Metric: Engage

To Sol, increased followers would indicate the reach of her campaign; this was a key metric point for @vivaviva. A few other points were also of particular interest:

• Number of followers
• Reach of a Tweet
• Most engaged time of the day

Because they had chosen the Target of an information account, she knew that her followers didn't necessarily come for her voice or her personal responses, but rather for the content and the brand that Viva represented—and this was more important than ever while promoting the healthy living campaign. Viva's great asset was the reach of its on-air programming and talent. Sol was consistently working with their stars to help them promote the healthy living initiatives from @vivaviva, and she knew it was important to isolate which of their talent were most effective at reaching interested parties. Once she saw some of her efforts begin to pay off—and the effectiveness of on-air promotion in converting new followers—she began to experiment with the best time of day to send Tweets in her efforts to optimize.

Metric: Explore

There were a few metrics in particular within the Explore category that gave Sol a wake-up call about some of the work still to be done.

• Press mentions of Twitter account
• New relationships created
• Number of lists following (lists your organization is following)
• Number of influencers actively followed

For a large brand like Viva—and a large account like @vivaviva—it was easy to forget all that she might be missing by not spending more proactive time on this step. Indeed, when Sol looked back at the past six months, she saw there was little time for exploring anything. Viva has the huge asset of a large base of potential Twitter users who could generate large followings (because some were high-profile, and because of the sheer volume of accounts between individual TV shows, actors, and the main Viva channel account itself). In truth, after six months she was still catching up. Although she saw the concept of exploring as valuable, and she tried to start tweeting some important Latin American TV journalists from the @vivaviva account, she knew this was an area she would need to work on.

In the future, Sol would need to take the advice that Kara from the Kenyan non-profit organization was already following—rereading the Explore chapter of this book (Chapter Five), looking for relevant influencers, following them, and creating public (and private) lists of them as necessary.

The Viva case study brings up many issues that brands regularly face when they buckle down to start making a difference using Twitter. By starting on Twitter before they made a decision (or devised a strategy) to do so, they don't know their own strengths.

Ultimately, both of these case studies show organizations that believe in the power of Twitter to reach their supporters but need help to do so well. Although they each have a ways to go, they are trying hard to educate their followers and change the world. For a small non-profit organization like Inua, using the T.W.E.E.T. model can be an effective, concrete way to better prepare a winning strategy and excel on Twitter. A large brand like Viva has just as much potential to benefit from the T.W.E.E.T. framework.

See more great case studies of organizations using the T.W.E.E.T. model at http://twitter4good.com/resources/case-studies/