Bookmark this on Delicious

Tweet

#charitytuesday: We are all Content Writers now. So what does your Twitter tone say about You?

Have Twitter’s 140 character constraints made us any more concise? Surely it has made us think harder about the words we use to convey our meaning in such limited length? For charities, endeavouring to convey their personalities as well as raise their profiles via Twitter, the exact choice of words with which to tweet has become vitally important.

For #charitytuesday this week, JustGiving.com’s Charity Champion, Jonathan Waddingham casts his expert eye over some of the charities tweeting for their causes and identifies just what it is that makes for convincing content.

The real-time web. Where videos, pictures and words are shared in an instant; transmitted around the world and back. Stories are told and re-told; shared with friends, social networks, professional networks, spammers and bots alike. And they all, ultimately, rest on one thing – words.

A picture may show the devastating effects of a tsunami, or a video show you a well being drilled in Africa that you helped to fund, but no-one will see them unless you tell them about it and to tell people about it, you need to use words.

This is where I believe Twitter has started to change the way so many people communicate. Have we become more concise due to the 140 character constraints? Quite probably. But more importantly: we are all content writers now. Everyone who has a Twitter account is a producer of content.

At the moment, Twitter is only a medium for sharing words. Yes, you can share links to photos, videos, recordings, anything, but sharing a link to them alone isn’t guaranteed to get people to click.

We have had blogs for years now and people have talked to each other in social networks and on forums, but never in the quite same format and constrained focus on words as on Twitter.

As my professional (and personal) interest is in looking at how charities can use the web, I follow a lot of charity accounts on Twitter. Some are good, some are bad – not all Twitter accounts are equal. But if you look closely at a charity’s Twitter stream, you can soon see the ones which really consider the content of their tweets and who craft sentences that make best use of the medium’s constraints. You can also tell a lot about an organisation from their tone of voice – and where better to get a tone of voice across than on Twitter?

If you look at the websites for brands such as Innocent Drinks or Green Thing, you get an immediate impression of what sort of organisation they are, just by reading the words they use. It’s exactly the same, only magnified to a much larger extent, on Twitter.

So let’s take a look at a few random charity tweets:

“Well done to all of our runners who took part in Run to the Beat yesterday. Photos now on Flickr http://is.gd/3KGHx”

What is the Meningitis Research Foundation saying in those 140 characters? Clearly, that it values its supporters and thanks them for their efforts. They have photos, so they must have been there, and they want to share the experience with people who couldn’t be there. It’s inclusive and thankful.

And how’s this for a friendly tone of voice from the Citizenship Foundation:

“Oh dear, our website front page is having style issues. Please bear with us while we resolve the issue. Thank you ”

Every website has issues every now and then – but this isn’t a tweet that “apologises for the inconvenience caused”. It’s human, and you can empathise.

But being human doesn’t mean that a charity has to sound fake, or not mention the cause it exists to support. I love the simplicity of what Kidney Research UK said here:

“Hope everyone is having a good Friday and looking forward to the weekend, hope you’re drinking lots of water to keep those kidneys healthy!”

We all like saying how great Fridays are and how much we’re looking forward to the weekend, but they’ve thrown in some health tips too. It made me think: I best keep drinking water as that’s good for my kidneys – great awareness-raising in one easy tweet. The advice that they clearly want to give wasn’t forced in, by saying something like: “you should drink more water to help your kidneys”, it was just added on to the end of a tweet, expressing what everyone else thinks on a Friday. A simple, yet extremely effective, example of being human and connecting with the audience whilst still getting an important message across.

So what’s my point? Well, for any brand on Twitter, whether charity or corporate, there’s never been such importance placed on so few words. So we need to appreciate that we are all content writers now, and as such, the skills of writing well (specifically, writing well for the web) are becoming ever more important. And how you say something on Twitter is just as important, if not more important, than what you might say elsewhere. It’s your brand, expressed in 140 characters.

Until Twitter puts videos and photos directly into the stream, we can only use the power of words to get our message across, and those organisations that understand that, appreciate that, and take care of their words, will be the ones that flourish.