Nonprofit PR has pulled together a simple list of mistakes groups often make as they wade into the social networking world.  Here are the highlights:

Setting up your nonprofit’s Facebook account as a person instead of a page: This is of the most common mistakes made by nonprofits when they first begin using Facebook. Some do it on purpose for a variety of well-meaning reasons, while others simply don’t know any better. A nonprofit should always create a page and categorize it properly as a nonprofit organization. Ideally, nonprofits want to have thousands of supporters on Facebook, and personal accounts allow a maximum of 5,000 friends.

Not fully thinking through the name for your Facebook page: At a basic level, there are two primary branding components on a Facebook page: Your organization’s name and your profile image. While this seems simple, remember that once the Facebook page you created for your nonprofit has 100 fans, you can no longer change the page name (your image, on the other hand, can be changed as many times as you desire). There are currently two options to get around this rule if necessary: Either create a new page and ask your supports to “like” you there instead; or stay with the original name Regardless, when you initially create your page, be sure to take the name into close consideration.

Creating a Facebook page, but not monitoring it properly: There is a debate over whether or not nonprofits should delete Facebook posts or comments (which some equate to censorship). At the very least, nonprofits should monitor their pages for posts and comments that are inappropriate or that are spam. Don’t let anyone use your organization’s wall to promote their own products or agendas, and always monitor all comments for inappropriateness.

Signing up for Twitter when you really don’t have the time for Twitter: Twitter can be a great marketing communications tool for a nonprofit, but only if it is able to invest time on a regular basis. If your organization wants to get to know Twitter, first simply join as an individual and use it as an information consumer. It is a great time-saving tool for getting information from the organizations and causes that you care about. Start there and determine if it makes sense for your organization to make it a priority. If you don’t have time to do something on Twitter on a regular basis, you are better off not creating a profile for your nonprofit.

Using a logo, rather than a graphic icon, as a profile photo: Graphic icons in logos are making a very strong comeback as a response to the need for a strong social-media brand icon. The best branded nonprofit Facebook and Twitter users typically don’t use their organizations’ entire logos as their profile photo. Instead, they use the graphic icon (think red ribbon for AIDS awareness) as the profile photo. It is important to understand that most people will see your icon as a very small image, so make sure what you choose works. Take the time to think about what will work best to meet your organization’s brand guidelines and strategic goals.

Dan Zarrella has posted an infographic — all the rage these days — on how to get more clicks on twitter. While it’s unclear whether his findings are statistically sound, he’s gathered some interesting tidbits useful for those of us trying to get more out of our twitter accounts.

• Tweet later in the day: Tweets posted in the afternoon hours had higher click through rates (CTRs) than tweets posted in the morning

• Tweet on weekends: Tweets posted on Friday, Saturday and Sunday had higher CTRs than those posted during the rest of the week.

• Write Tweets between 120 and 130 characters: He analyzed the length of 200,000 tweets containing links and found the highest CTR on those that were between 120 and 130 characters long

• Tweet your links at a slower pace: The speed of link tweeting increased, the CTR decreased.

• Place links about 25% of the way through your tweet: He analyzed the length of 200,000 and found that the the highest click through rates were for links that were placed roughly 1/4 of the way through the tweet.

• Use action words: Tweets that contained more adverbs and verbs had higher CTRs than noun and adjective heavy tweets.

• Choose the right words and phrases: Tweets containing “via,” “@,” “RT,” “please,” and “check” had higher CTRs than tweets without those words.

• Experiment using the paper.li system: Of all the words and phrases he analyzed, the phrase that had the greatest positive effect on CTR was from us of the paper.li tweet: “daily is out.”

The folks over at the New Organizing Institute have a great “tip of the day” for new twitter users. If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably seen a few tweets that look something like this: “.@neworganizing, what time does tonight’s event start?” So what’s the dot (.) at the beginning of a tweet?  According to NOI, “It all comes down to how Twitter determines what to show people. When your tweet starts with the handle of a person or organization, Twitter assumes it’s a reply. So why does that matter?”

• Replies are filtered. Twitter assumes replies are semi-private, so tweets that start with a handle (@neworganizing what time…) get filtered. Only people who follow BOTH you AND the account you’re tweeting at will see a reply. This keeps your stream from getting filled with questions and replies between other people.
• Why is this good? It’s helpful if you follow people who answer a lot of questions on Twitter. For example, I follow lots of fantasy football analysts who answer hundreds of questions per day. If I saw all those responses, it would clog my stream.
• Why is it bad? Maybe you want everyone to see the tweet you sent to @WhiteHouse and RT you. Or maybe you want everyone to see your response to a question. When people tweet questions at @neworganizing, I usually want everyone who follows us to see the response, because I know others may have the same question.
• How to solve it. If you’re tweeting at someone and you want all your followers to see it, put any character in front of the handle. It could be a dot (.), a >, a blank space, a word (Hey @WhiteHouse), or anything you want. As long as @ isn’t the first character in your tweet, Twitter gets tricked into thinking it’s just an ordinary tweet, and shows it to everyone who follows you or searches for the other party’s handle.

M+R has a great checklist for preparing to live tweet an event. As they remind us “Live-tweeting can be a great way to build your audience on Twitter – if you do it right…Setting yourself up for successful live-tweeting before the event is just as important as doing a good job with the tweets themselves. Thinking through a few simple things in advance will not only ensure that you can logistically do your tweeting from the event, but it can also massively increase the number of people who see your tweets.” Here’s the checklist to get you started:

1. Follow the people you think will be interested in the content you will be posting and the people you know are going to the event. They may follow you back, helping you build an audience!
2. Check the event location for Wi-Fi and/or mobile phone service. Some events held at hotel or conference venues have spotty reception or Wi-Fi. If you need a password to access the internet, make sure to find it out in advance!
3. Find out the designated hashtag for the event and promote it to your followers before the event begins. This allows people to search for tweets related to the event — regardless of who posts them.
4. If there is no designated hashtag, search Twitter to see what hashtag(s) other attendees are using and follow suit.
5. If there is no hashtag already in use, choose a short but memorable combination of letters and numbers and start the trend yourself. For example, M+R’s annual Benchmarks event was live-tweeted under the hashtag #2011Bench. Before settling on a hashtag, do a quick search to make sure the hashtag isn’t already in use!
6. Find out the Twitter handles of speakers/presenters at the event ahead of time so you can mention them in your tweets if you quote them. Those people may re-tweet your tweet to their followers, which could help build your audience!
7. Decide whether you’ll be tweeting from a phone or a computer. If you’re tweeting from a non-smart phone, you’ll need to add your phone to your Twitter account ahead of time. Log in to Twitter, go to http://twitter.com/devices and follow the instructions on the screen.
8. If you’re tweeting from an iPhone or another smartphone, download the Hootsuite or Twitter application.
9. Bring a charger for your phone or laptop – tweeting can wear out your battery and it’s best to be prepared.
10. Decide how you will archive all of the tweets from the event. Sign up for a free service such as twapperkeeper.com.

Twitter Hashtags got you stumped? M+R blog has come to the rescue. They’ve put together a quick list of tips of how to strategically use hashtags to expand your organization’s reach.

For those of you that are wondering what on earth a hashtag is: For those less familiar with the Twitterverse, hashtags are akin to keywords. Created as a way to group information on Twitter, hashtags allow you to categorize the 40,000+ Tweets that happen every minute.

To create a hashtag, just place the hash symbol (#) before any word or phase. The hashtag can go anywhere in your Tweet.

By strategically incorporating trending hashtags into your Tweets, your organization can begin to increase its reach on Twitter. Here’s how:

1. Find out what’s trending by visiting search.twitter.com or whatthetrend.com, a website dedicated to tracking and defining trends.
2. Take advantage of existing trends by incorporating a trending hashtag into your Tweet!

For example: During the last week of 2010, #2010was and #iprefer were both trending topics for several days. Either hashtag could have been easily worked into any organization’s Tweets:

#iprefer a world where everyone is equal. Tell your senator to support XYZ policy: YOUR LINK

#2010Was the year that @YourOrg supporters sent 700K letters in support of #equality: YOUR LINK

Users monitor the hashtags they care about. If a hashtag is trending, that means it is one of the most popular hashtags currently being used on Twitter. In other words, thousands of people are actively using (and likely monitoring) that particular hashtag! By Tweeting with that hashtag, you’ve broken out of your organization’s direct circle of followers and inserted yourself into a new, wider audience.

When someone monitoring the trending hashtag sees your organization’s Tweet and retweets it to one of their own followers, your organization’s circle expands to include their followers as well.

Turns out there are not huge swaths of the American public spending their day using social media.  Here are some surprising stats posted by our friends over at Frogloop:

• Twitter: 1.1 % of the U.S. population is on Twitter. (source: April 2011 results from Experian Hitwise.)

• Facebook: While Facebook says that they have 150M U.S. “active” users, which is 48% of the U.S. population, only 50% of active users login any given day. So 24% of the U.S. population logs into Facebook on any given day to check or post updates. (source: Facebook)

• LinkedIn: 0.37% of the U.S. population is on LinkedIn. (source: April 2011 results from Experian Hitwise.)

• YouTube: 19.94% of the U.S population is on YouTube. (source: April 2011 results from Experian Hitwise.)

• MySpace: 1.19% of the U.S. population is on MySpace. (source: April 2011 results from Experian Hitwise.)

Twitter still got you stumped? Mashable has put together 17 twitter tips — as zen koan-like tweets, of course.

1) @jeffpulver,“The secret to Twitter is to listen, connect, share and engage. It’s the conversations that matter.”
2) @davepeck,“Respond to everybody, positive or negative.”
3) @michiganflavor, “Retweet, retweet, retweet. People love to see their stuff retweeted, and they’ll start retweeting you.”
4) @shrmsocmedguy, “Use your tweeting to set up meetings.”
5) @dstatusstalker, “Start a conversation. Reach out to others, and say hello.”
6) @kratzpr, “Don’t think of it as a tool, think of it as a gateway for being social.”
7) @ctreada, “Ignore it; they’re all pornographers anyway.” (Chris’s other tip: “Chill out.”)
@jkrohrs, “Don’t tweet if you can’t spell.”
9) @moniguzman, “Tweet what comes naturally. Don’t try to fulfill someone else’s expectations.”
10) @shashib, “More than an RSS feed, connecting with people on Twitter gives you interesting content that is validated by them.”
11) @jennydevaughn, “You need to have brand sacrifice if you want to be viewed as an expert in your field. Only tweet about 10 topics, events or ideas.”
12) @robkey, CEO, Converseon: “Embrace your insignificance.”
13) @zagrrl “The best way to learn is to share.”
14) @heidiotway “Follow the best, learn from the best.”
15) @jonnorp, “Remember that it flies forever.”
16) @chrisvary, “Don’t connect your Twitter to Facebook.”
17) @joeyinteractive, “Marketing doesn’t spread; stories do.”

Social media tools are powerful for quickly and cheaply broadcasting our frames and messages out to the world.  But tools like Twitter and Facebook are also very effective listening devices. NTEN has a useful post on 5 free tools to listen to what people are saying and where they are saying it.   Many of these tools are Twitter-focused, because Twitter is the easiest place to get started in listening.

Google Alerts (alerts.google.com): At the bare minimum, you should use Google Alerts for your organization’s name, acronym, prominent staff names like your ED, and large campaigns you’re working on. Depending on the number of mentions you get, you’ll probably want to set the alerts to come to your inbox as they happen, so you know quickly what’s being said and can determine a response, if needed.

Tweetdeck (tweetdeck.com): Tweetdeck is great because it runs in the background and gives you desktop alerts for mentions, similar to Microsoft Outlook when you get a new email. You can customize the different columns and have an array of search terms for people talking about you on Twitter. For example, mine has the following columns: @ replies of my personal twitter account, @ replies of my organizational account, mentions of “humane society”, mentions of “hsus”, and direct messages.

Tweetbeep (tweetbeep.com): Tweetbeep is essentially Google Alerts for Twitter. Whenever you’re mentioned on Twitter, you’ll get sent an email with details of that mention. You  can specify any search term you want. This is great for people who are not ready for the power of Tweetdeck with all its bells and whistles. Twitter is the most real-time account you have of what people are saying about you, so it’s really important to have a Twitter listening tool that matches your comfort level.

Kurrently (kurrently.com): It is amazing, and scary, how many people still do not lock down the privacy on their Facebook profiles. That’s what makes Kurrently so useful: it’s a search engine for public Facebook updates. It actually now pulls in a lot more than Facebook updates, but that’s what I find it most useful for.

Twitter Analyzer (twitteranalyzer.com): It is very important to think about your goals and how you’re going to measure success when diving into a new online venture, and listening is no different. Twitter Analyzer provides a breadth of statistics it provides and its ease of use. The graphs are pretty, too. It provides data such as number of followers, number of tweets, number of retweets, top hashtags, number of mentions, etc – which are great metrics. For Facebook, check out their built-in analytics for your fan page.

As with any new online tool and social network there is a learning curve to using and joining the conversation on Twitter. Twitter has an odd lingo and culture all its own. Here are a few of the quirky lingo essentials from Mashable:

• DM = Direct Message
• @ = Use to reply and always include proceeding a Twitter ID in a reply
• RT = Retweet
• Tweet = Sending a message on Twitter
• Tw + any other word. A fun practice on Twitter is to develop a new twist on old words. For example, Tworld = Twitter world, and Tweeples = Those who use Twitter.

There is also an evolving Twitter etiqutte. Most important is to learn about when you should “@” versus DM (i.e. Direct Message):

• Sending personal information like a phone number or email address. (It may seem like common sense, but I encourage you to NEVER post personal information like your social security number over ANY public forum.)
• A conversation which will consist of multiple “tweets” or a lengthy discussion with more than three posts. (Many people on Twitter will “unfollow” someone who sends multiple “tweets” in a row)
• Asking multiple questions to the same person or the same question asked to multiple people. (Your content becomes less valuable when people see the same thing repeated too many times…especially right in a row.)
• Correcting a mistake you’ve identified in someone’s blog post or “tweet.” (This isn’t required, but it is considered a common courtesy. The person who made the mistake will thank you.)
• Thanking each of your new followers. (It’s a nice concept to thank each of your new social media connections, but keep in mind how many responses you’re sending out each day or within a 10 minute period.)
• Making a request to someone. (Want to ask someone to write a guest blog post or partner on a project? Don’t put them on the spot in a public forum. Once you agree on a partnership, then by all means, tweet away!)
• Constructive criticism…this is your call. (If you have some pretty serious feedback to give someone, consider the most appropriate venue.)
• Getting someone’s attention! (Want to make a connection with someone, send them a direct message to get things started. A lot of people on Twitter get direct messages sent to their email or mobile phone.)

In The New Yorker this week, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a stinging critique of the claim that social media like Twitter and Facebook are reinventing activism.  We’ve pulled a few key quotes below, but the full article is worth a read. Gladwell is coming late to the debate, but he does a decent job at summing up a long-standing argument that’s been broiling in the grassroots organizing sector for some time. The following should give the gist of his core claims:

Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life. This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom led to high-risk activism.

The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism. It was also, crucially, strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. The N.A.A.C.P. was a centralized organization, run from New York according to highly formalized operating procedures…social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.

“Social networks are effective at increasing participation — by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires,” he writes. And the “weak ties” created by these platforms, he adds, cannot promote the discipline and strategy that true political activism requires.