My Twitter strategy has centered around use during events, trainings and emergency situations, particularly to distribute information about disaster response needs.
I first started using Twitter accounts in the fall of 2009. I created the Kansas Area Twitter account to tweet during a webcast announcing major changes to the organization of the United Methodist Church in Kansas and Nebraska. I used the account to give out the streaming address for a live stream we planned the next day, to solicit questions for it, and to watch the conversation online about the announcement.
Our use of Twitter as a communications office began to grow when we sent a team of people to Zimbabwe in January 2010. Because Internet service is unreliable in Zimbabwe, we thought we could use a National Geographic satellite phone to send tweets either directly to Twitter or to me via text. The satellite phone idea didn’t work as well as we had hoped, but the team was able to access Twitter online and post updates while in country. We used it again in 2011 when the next team traveled to Zimbabwe, texting updates home that were posted to Twitter.
In addition, we send our headlines out via RSS feed on Twitter and try to monitor related organizations and retweet as much as possible.
The Twitter accounts are used most during events, such as live webcasts and our annual meeting. We establish an official hashtag for events and conferences and publicize it in all our materials. We tweet under the hashtag and monitor the conversation with searches, retweeting other users’ comments.
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