Importance of getting some tweets character perfect

Howard Lake | 30 June 2010 | Blogs

• Tagged with:
• corporate
• Digital
• Twitter

Camera manufacturer Leica Camera AG (@leica_camera on Twitter) is currently encouraging its customers and others to help it support cancer charity AICR. It is using the model of a donation per new follower. It is offering to donate 50 euro cents for every new follower it attracts on Twitter, plus an extra 10,000 euros if it reaches 10,000 followers by 10 July 2010.
It’s easy to support: I’ve just helped unlock one euro by following @leica_camera from two of my Twitter accounts.
The campaign has some strengths, beyond the money it will raise for @AICR:
* Leica have created a hashtag for the campaign (#Leica4AICR) to help it spread and be tracked more easily.
* On Leica’s Twitter page background there’s a clear call to action in text – “Follow leica_camera”.
* It has a fairly clear closing date of 9 July 2010. One wouldn’t want this offer turning into a Craig Shergold-type Twitter meme or myth, whereby people will be telling others for years to come that just by following Leica they can generate a donation.
* It launched the campaign in a two-stage process, including a pre-announcement:

AICR have done well by retweeting the original announcements from @leica_camera. However, note that they did it with a Twitter retweet, not the original RT. As such, AICR’s retweet cannot be linked to by me or anyone else.
As you will guess, I think that this campaign could be improved in a number of ways. So, here are my suggestions, which might help you if your charity undertakes a similar campaign on Twitter with a corporate supporter.
1. Make sure the company’s announcement can be easily retweeted. @leica_camera’s could not be because it was too long. If you tried to retweet it it exceeded the 140 character limit by 8 characters. So, they rely on people to edit their message, which most people do not have the time or inclination to do so.

2. Help the charity attract followers too. While the aim of Leica Camera is to secure lots of followers for itself, the addition of an @ sign in its announcement would have made AICR’s Twitter account name clear and clickable, and therefore more likely to generate followers for the charity as well.
3. Indeed, a more generous version of this model could be for the corporate supporter to offer to donate an amount for each new Twitter follower secured for the charity. Microsoft UK did this years ago for the NSPCC in pre-Twitter days when it offered to donate for each new email address secured by the charity from newly registered supporters.
4. Don’t confuse your hashtags. In its announcement @leica_camera uses #Leica4AICR but on its Twitter background it uses #LEICAforAICR.
5. I’m not sure if 9 July is the closing date for the whole campaign, or just to reach the 10,000 mark. Will Leica carry on donating after that point? Perhaps future tweets will make that clear.
6. For the duration of the campaign Leica might have considered adding a twibbon or some other amendment to its Twitter avatar or icon, indicating that the campaign was underway. This isn’t essential, but it might help attract further attention from those who recognise the Leica logo and then look closely to see what it is associated with.
I’ll be sharing this shortly with the people at Leica and AICR. If anything, these tips show how important it is to get every one of your 140 characters correct in a Twitter message.
I wish the campaign well, and hope that other charities and companies make use of some of these tips.
Tweets by leica_camera
Tweets by AICR

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.