Yesterday, Twitter announced that they will offer enhanced profile pages to “increase your brand’s Twitter presence by prominently featuring your most important content and visually branding your page”.

Like Facebook Pages and Google Plus Business Profiles, Twitter Brand Pages profile are public.

What Twitter Brand Pages Include

Brand Pages are only offered to a small group of advertising customers, nonprofits and marque accounts, but they will be rolled out for all brands and nonprofits sometime in the near future.

Branded Header Image: Twitter Brand Pages will allow you to include a 835×90 pixel image. You can swap this image out frequently to get more attention from your followers.

Free Promoted Tweets: Twitter is allowing brands with enhanced profiles the ability to promote a Tweet to the top of their page’s timeline – for free. This will give your nonprofit the ability to feature specific videos, links or photos in the promoted tweet. Videos and photos will automatically expand within the Page’s timeline.

Exclusive Content: Twitter mentions exclusive content, but it’s not clear how the content is exclusive if the content is public. It would be cool if – like Facebook reveal tabs – exclusive content is only displayed to followers.

The Take-Away

It seems that enhanced profiles offer nothing more than the ability to create a more controlled experience of your organizations content. No doubt many other features will become available like analytics and more choices about featured content.

But, you will still have to converse with people on Twitter. That will never change.

What do you think of enhanced profiles?

If your nonprofit is just starting out on Twitter, the first thing you want to do is find people who are already talking about your cause. But once you find these people, what next? How do you start a conversation with a complete stranger?

Here are a few thoughts about how empathy might just be your most powerful way to sell your organization:

Tomorrow I’ll be conducting a free webinar on how your org can started with Twitter.

Last month I blogged about Twylah, an awesome Twitter app that creates more traffic for your tweets and blog posts.

What’s a Power Tweet?

Within Twylah, there’s a feature called a “Power Tweet”. Twylah creator Eric Kim says that Power Tweets are tweets that have their “own contextual landing page (with all your recent, related tweets)”.

Here’s a quick video demonstrating how Power Tweets work:

How to create effective Power Tweets

Eric recommends the following when creating Power Tweets:

• Share interesting content from sites like New York Times, TechCrunch, etc.
• Include a link to a video, photo or article
• Use keywords that you write about frequently
• Use Power Tweets for those tweets you really want to count!

If you’ve been using Twylah, share what you like below:

If you use Twitter for your nonprofit , you’ve probably been able to meet amazing people, form unexpected alliances, and find relevant conversations that you wouldn’t have found anywhere else.

But there is one big problem with Twitter.

Tweets lose juice

The graph above is a perfect example of a typical tweet’s lifespan. Born at noon, in the grave by 4:00PM the same day.

Longer tails with Twylah

Eric Kim is founder of Twylah, a tool that transforms your tweets into a custom fan page (see mine here).

With Twylah, your tweets are organized by the topics you tweet about the most, and showcased on a single page where people can easily scan for content they find interesting.

How Twylah gives your tweets more traffic

As explained in the above graph, Twylah gives your tweets more life, simply because they stick around more on your Twylah page.

Twylah also gives juice to your SEO

With Twylah your tweets are:

• Organized in a search-engine-optimized topical pages.
• Discoverable on Google and Bing as topical, contextual collections of tweets.
• Presented to a search audience in much friendlier format.

Twylah looks  beautiful

One thing you’ll notice about Twylah is how beautifully content is displayed on a single page. This no doubt is one of the reasons why Twylah has the impact it does.

Sign up for Twylah here.

What do you guys think about Twylah?

As you probably know, Twitter launched a new version of its website that makes it much more user friendly.

In this video, you see an overview of the major enhancements, including:

• Expanded conversation view for replies
• Expanded context around individual tweets
• Picture and video preview
• Detailed information about retweets
• Conversation view of direct message
• Suggested people to follow and add to lists

Check out some of the webinars on Twitter I do with Charityhowto.

Executive leaders at nonprofits should put community engagement via social media as a top priority in their job descriptions. They need to get their hands dirty.

But more often than not they don’t.

A broken model?

Usually, staffers do the “dirty work” with social media while management gets a debrief on ROI.

This is like having a nurses aid listen to a patient’s acute cardiac symptoms and tell the heart surgeon where to operate. A lot of critical information would be lost without the surgeon using her own stethoscope to listen directly to the patient’s heart.

Listening to your community is no different. Your community’s voice has a particular rhythm that can only be understood firsthand.

Four reasons EDs should be on Twitter

1. Executive leaders can understand the community better through unfiltered direct access
2. They can create greater trust within that community by demonstrating the orgs commitment to engage
3. Respond faster to the community by eliminating the time it takes to play the telephone game
4. They can anticipate needs that less experienced staff members might miss

But what if our executive leaders are too busy?

Too busy? If they aren’t willing to make an effort to hear firsthand from the people they serve, maybe they aren’t the right leaders for the organization.

Maybe their heart’s not in it?

This past Tuesday I attended the 140 character conference in Boston to learn new ways that organizations use Twitter.

Jeff Pulver founded 140 character conference as a “platform for the worldwide twitter community to: listen, connect, share and engage with each other, while collectively exploring the effects of the emerging real-time internet on business [and nonprofits]“.

Do you have use Twitter to attend?

No. Although the original motivation for these conferences was how Twitter facilitates connection, a variety of social tools are discussed.

@CarissaO, @healthyjack and @shwen talked about Rudy created a NING network to help others with disabilities. @stales talked about how social networks empower cancer patients to support each other. And @bhsprincipal, @bhsprincipal, @sanmccarron and @baldy7 talked about how Facebook and Twitter is changing how high school students interact with their teachers.

Can’t I just read a blog and get the same info?

No. What makes the 140 character conferences powerful is the life-to-life exchanges between participants. And Jeff would agree that this compassion and humanity is what the real-time web is all about.

Jeff says it best:

Get it? There’s a palpable transfer of human compassion and excitement that’s exchanged at 140. And ironically, the most powerful way to learn about social media not on the web, but in person.

Following are the upcoming 140 character conferences:

This is the first of three videos I’ll be publishing over the next week.

Please share and enjoy!

by mathieuthouvenin

During a recent CharityHowTo webinar about Twitter, folks wanted learn some tactics to increase their Twitter followers.

A simple tactic for newbies is to follow users that are already conversing about topics related to their cause. The theory is that if 50% of Twitter followers auto-follow in return, you would get 50 new followers simply by following 100 users.

Naturally folks were curious about automatically following people, so I told them about two applications that allow you to find new followers and automatically following them based on vetting criteria.

Do you hate me now?

Some of you will say that I’m completely evil for using any type of automation on Twitter, and that’s fine.

My belief is that technology is not inherently evil, and that it is possible to use even the much-hated auto-DM in ways that people actually like.

Again, auto-following will work as long as you understand that you are following real people that like to have real conversations. Keep them formost in your mind, and you’ll make good choices in how you use these tools.

How to auto-follow people on Twitter

Here are two tools that allow you to choose specific criteria for finding new friends on Twitter.

1. EasyTweets – Upside: Very easy to use, extremely intuitive UI. Downside: Criteria to find new users to follow is limited to keyword search and location.
   
2. SocialOomph – Upside: Very feature rich friend finder criteria (including number of followers, friend/following ratio, and number of status updates), Downside: Very difficult to use. UI can cause eyeball headaches or possible aneurysms
   

What are other ways to use automated search and vetting?