Social media 1: Twitter

March 21^st is a special day for 2 reasons:

First of all, today is an International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Second, today marks the 5th anniversary of Twitter!

Bite-size info about Twitter:

Twitter is a type of social media for social networking and micro-blogging. Within the limit of 140 words per post called “tweet”, users can express and share their interests, thoughts, or any piece of information in real time. Users can subscribe to others’ tweets by “following”. Twitter was created in 2006 and today it is available in 6 languages.

As of March 20, 2011, Invisible Children has 28,422 followers and 1,609 tweets in total.
To get a better picture of how Invisible Children uses Twitter, I decided to focus on the frequency and content of their tweets. Since IC appears to tweet every day, I counted the number of tweets per day. As for the content, I sorted each tweet according to the following categories:

• Africa (ex. quotes, , updates about IC’s projects, news related to conflict in Northern Uganda, Congo and Libya)
• Announcements (ex. Recruitment for workers/volunteers, links to online articles featuring IC, thanking journalists/participants)
• Miscellaneous (ex. Links to photos unrelated to Africa, information about iPhone, current issues in places other than Africa)

Here are my findings for the following 4 days.

March 8th, 2011
Tweets per day: 8
Africa: 3 (quotes about LRA, news about Uganda)
Announcements: 2 (recruiting summer interns, link to article about IC)
Miscellaneous: 3 (iPhone 5, Mardi Gras tradition in New Orleans, Pixar’s movie UP)

March 9th, 2011Tweets per day: 8
Africa: 3 (UN aid and civil protection in DRC, civilians killed by LRA, IC railroad revival tour)
Announcements: 2 (call for volunteers in Austin, thanking SPIN magazine)
Miscellaneous: 3 (Phil Collins, Apps to Watch, Waterman Dave)

March 10th, 2011
Tweets per day: 8
Africa: 4 (Libya, Campaign 25, etc)
Announcements: 2 (thanking OBSilence, interview with SunAirway)
Miscellaneous: 2 (artist, Bob Baker)

March 11th, 2011
Tweets per day: 8
Africa: 4 (UN and rebels in DRC, UN news on DRC, quote, Campaign 25)
Miscellaneous: 4 (photo, iPhone 5, 2 tweets about Japan earthquake)

As evident above, I noticed that IC’s tweets are not all about their mandate. To be honest, I was first confused and even disappointed to see tweets that are unrelated to their project. Why do they choose to tweet about the iPhone 5? Yet at the same time, their tweets about current issues happening in places other than Africa show that Invisible Children’s radar of interest extends worldwide.

The Skype interview with Jedidiah helped me get a better understanding of IC’s strategic use of Twitter.

According to Jedidiah, the target audience of IC’s Twitter are people who are little older than high school students (Whereas Facebook is used to target mostly high school students). 8 staffs in IC have an access to the organization’s Twitter account. This explains why I was seeing exactly 8 tweets each day. Although he said that IC’s voice in the social media can be stronger in terms of better coordination, the 8 staffs communicate with each other to ensure that there are no duplications of the same information.

In response to my question regarding the tweets about seemingly unrelated matters to the project of IC, Jedidiah said that it the staffs do it intentionally because they want to show to the public that “our personality as an organization is not one dimensional”. Through the social media, Invisible Children aims to present a “new type of citizenship, new type of life” and they want to be “someone you want to hang out with”. In other words, by tweeting things that staffs are personally interested about, the IC is utilizing social media to bring them and the audience closer together. After all, common interests can create instant bonds between the people.

Again I am glad that I got to talk to Jedidiah because it really changed my perspective on how I see their tweets. Jedidiah also commented that “we don’t want you to burn out on whole Africa thing [because] life of service isn’t just a season but a commitment of your being”. This particular quote struck me because it shows that IC is determined to commit themselves into a lifelong service and they are encouraging the others to think of their involvement with IC in a long term spectrum. It made me wonder about the meaning of humanitarianism. IC’s service does not end with an emergency/temporary relief type of humanitarianism but it extends to something beyond.

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Invisible Children's Twitter: @invisible