Twitter has been the focus of much attention lately as celebrities, politicians, and marketers have flocked to the site to spread their messages to the world 140 characters at a time. If you're running a charity or non-profit, can you benefit from having a Twitter account? More importantly, can you use Twitter to gather support for your organization, raise funds, or run a community initiative like a cell phone recycling drive?

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a free micro-blogging platform in which users can broadcast their messages to their followers on the site. Each tweet (Twitter message) must be 140 characters or less in length and may contain any information - a remark, a quote, an answer to someone's question, a news item, or a link to a web page. So, is it a numbers' game - the more people following you on Twitter the larger the potential audience for your message? While a sizable following on Twitter is important, you will soon discover that the quality of your followers matters more than the number of people or accounts following you.

Why use Twitter?

Twitter is being used by over 6 million people on the planet today. Granting your charity or non-profit doesn't really need to reach that many people, delivering your message to just a small fraction of that vast audience has the potential to expand support for your organization exponentially. Twitter is continuing to grow at a rapid pace - it is expected to grow to 18 million users by 2010. It has already established its reach, relevance, and influence over a large global audience. If your charity or non-profit is not yet using Twitter, why not?

Building your followers

The bottomline question for anyone wanting to run a successful promotion on Twitter is influence. How many people among your followers will "retweet" or resend your message to their own followers?

This is where the quality of your followers becomes strategically important. Someone with 50,000 followers may be a lot less influential than someone like Dr. Mani (@drmani),a surgeon in India working to provide much-needed heart surgeries to underpriveleged children. Dr. Mani has only 4,000 or so followers, but these are people who believe in what he's doing and will retweet Dr. Mani's messages to their own followers. As a result, his messages reach hundreds of thousands if not millions of Twitter users.

So, how do you create an army of followers/evangelists/partners on Twitter?

One word: relationships.

Social media sites may be a very fast-paced medium of communication, but the people using these sites still value personal relationships and authenticity. Send out tweets that are relevant to your organization or industry, provide value, answer questions, respond to direct messages, thank people for retweeting your posts.

Be interested in others, engage in conversations, provide useful links. There are so many ways, but the main thing is to build relationships with people who know you, trust you, and will help you out on any initiative - like a cell phone recycling drive - you might want to promote on Twitter. Reach out to influentials or people with huge following, they can greatly help you if they're sold to what you're doing and what you're trying to achieve.

Running your cell phone recycling drive

Running a cell phone recycling drive using Twitter is relatively easy and very effective if you've already established credibility and trust among your followers. If you've already been providing valuable links and information to your followers, you can readily insert in-between messages promoting your drive, without antagonizing anyone.

Create a landing page in your site in which you describe what the drive is all about, why you're doing it, and who will benefit from it. You may also want to include some forms to capture subscriber or supporter information or addresses of people requesting mailing labels (if you're providing those). Don't forget YOUR call to action and to mention who can help you with the initiative - is it for everyone, just people from the US, or just people from a certain city or state?

When you've created this page, you may now start sending out messages on your Twitter account to direct people to your cell phone recycling drive page. Don't send promotional messages every hour, just because you're excited about your drive. The easiest way to lose followers on Twitter is to spam them incessantly with self-promotional messages. One or two messages a day is enough. If you have quality followers, you can be sure your message will be viewable to a good number of people, which hopefully will translate to more support for your cell phone drive.

As you've probably noticed, running a cell phone recycling drive for your charity or non-profit is just one example of the myriad number of ways you can use Twitter. The popularity of social media sites virtually exploded overnight, and everyone in business is just starting to react. It will serve well those people who benefit from your non-profit or charity work, if your organization can establish a presence and grow on Twitter.