Tweet, Tweet: A Crash Course in Twitter for Nonprofits

*Connector vs. broadcaster: A broadcaster doesn't want to get to know its audience. It just wants its audience to absorb a message. The idea on Twitter is to connect with your audience on a human level.

If you're considering event-based tweeting, Haydon warned that the collateral damage of high output on Twitter could be:

• Your current Twitter relationships may be turned off by sudden broadcasting.
• Users who find you in a search may choose not to follow you if they see a high amount of broadcast posts.
• Any new connections won't get the attention they deserve.

*Your avatar: Logo or photo? Who do you party with, Haydon asked, logos or people? Use a personal photo on your profile; something that says, "I'm a person," because that's what people will connect with.

"People don't want to make friends with logos, people want to make friends with people," he said.

Make sure your avatar stands out and communicates who you are — whether personally or as an organization.

*Finding your advocates: Haydon recommended doing keyword searches on Twitter, creating alerts on TweetBeep and Tweet Scan, and doing real-time searches on monitter and TweetGrid.

With TweetBeep, for example, an organization can receive notifications by e-mail if someone is talking about it on Twitter.

Once you find your advocates — people who are hardcore supporters of your issue — follow them and their followers.

Haydon also recommended organizations do hashtag-based events. A hashtag is a simple way of categorizing content on Twitter so users with similar interests can converse about that topic. They're created by prefixing a word with a hash symbol, for example "#fundraising."

He also pointed to the success of Ashton Kutcher's recent campaign to beat out CNN to be the first person to get one million followers on Twitter, which he won, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations combined from Kutcher, CNN and other celebs to the United Nations to fight the spread of malaria. For the campaign, Kutcher leveraged his celebrity status, challenged others, and created a doable and specific call to action with great success.