Recently a wonderful new Kabissa volunteer, Ziyanda Xaso, has taken charge of our social media outreach. Ziyanda has given me an opportunity I have been waiting for to let go of the @kabissa Twitter account on a daily basis and shift my own Twitter following to my @tobiaseigen account. This helps since of course I am doing and following more with my life than just running Kabissa! So if you want to keep in touch with me on Twitter, do check in with me at @tobiaseigen. If you want to follow Kabissa and the organizations we showcase through our networking platform, follow @kabissa.

TweetDeck Chrome App

Twitter is one of those services that is powerful because it can be harnessed using various tools and platforms. Unfortunately that has also meant for me personally that my involvement in Twitter has slowed when for one reason or another I have had to switch from one tool to another and when I haven’t had the time to figure it out.

The TweetDeck Chrome App is my current Twitter client of choice. It provides a single login to access multiple Twitter accounts and configurable columns so I can set it up to show me Twitter activity related to me as well as hashtags for whatever it is I am currently wanting to track and work on (e.g. #socentwknd #iati #open #africa).

“Follow from” feature in TweetDeck

TweetDeck also has features that help with handling multiple accounts, including “follow from…” and “retweet from…” which have enabled me to start recalibrating which tweeps are followed from which account and communicate the way I want to about various things I am working on.

Social WordPress Plugin by Mailchimp

One of my biggest regrets about the direction social media is taking is that we all are being encouraged to share and interact on Facebook, where the focus is on what is going on RIGHT NOW and content we are creating is disappearing into oblivion.

When I have something to say or ask that I want to be able to refer back to later, or when I want to track over time who is interested in what I have to say or added a comment, I post it to this blog. The Social plugin by Mailchimp does a terrific job of integrating the process of sharing the post via Facebook and Twitter and pulling back in the responses, retweets and likes. Take a look below to see how it works in practice.

How we use Twitter at Kabissa

Back in 2009, Beth Kanter encouraged me to write a blog post about how Kabissa uses Twitter. That post is still worth a read, methinks, but Ziyanda has made some significant adjustments. Below are some of the changes that I have been monitoring and find to be very interesting and impactful.

1. Kabissa Twitter Lists are streamlined so there are now only two lists to maintain – Interesting (tweeps we follow especially closely) and Kabissa members on Twitter.
2. Kabissa presence on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are connected. When we want to share something everywhere, we post it to LinkedIn from where it automatically flows to Twitter and from there to Facebook.
3. We post more frequently on Facebook than on Twitter. Facebook is where our followers appear to be interested in getting interesting content on a more regular basis. We also take advantage of Facebook features like photo sharing that help us increase our reach.