Not taking advantage of all that twitter has to offer is probably one of the biggest mistakes you could make early on as a start-up social venture. Everyone who is anyone in your field is on twitter. And twitter actually gives you the chance to do them favors. Think about all the free marketing you could provide Ashoka or the Acumen Fund by retweeting their messages to your followers. The more followers you have and the more they trust you, the bigger the favor. Eventually, you might warm up even the most remote, inaccessible experts in your field to the possibility of exchanging a few emails or even phone calls!

Connecting with people over twitter is exactly like connecting with people in real life (see last week’s blog post). If it’s really going to be something valuable for you (i.e. connecting you with the right people), it boils down to asking yourself how you can help your loyal followers. This simple question has enabled us to grow our followership at a rate of 500 new followers each month. All it takes is 30 minutes a day. That’s 30 minutes that enables you to help others, market your brand, become an expert in your field, and build genuine relationships with people you want to connect with! Here’s how to do it!

1. Pick an information niche. Choose a very narrow field and tweet about that and virtually nothing else. For us @BeUnreasonable, we tweet about how social entrepreneurship can be used to create high-impact solutions to the world’s biggest problems. We try to answer questions like “How can I start a social enterprise?”, “What have proven, high-impact social enterprises done to effectively address social/environmental problems?” and “How can social entrepreneurs gain access to the resources they need to make their social enterprise successful?”

2. Become a gatekeeper. Anyone in your niche has access to the same information that you do. That’s exactly the problem. Few people have the time to go through it and discern what’s useful and what’s junk. Using Twitter, you have an incredible opportunity to address this “pain in the market.” Filter information so others don’t have to, constantly guided by asking yourself “what is valuable to people in this information niche?” If you do it well over time, people will come to regard you as an “expert gatekeeper of information.” They’ll start coming to you first before pouring through endless streams of articles all over the internet.

3. Make information come to you. To make it easy on yourself, rely on your own gatekeepers. Don’t waste too much time searching for information. Make information come to you by using an RSS feed (I use Google reader). Identify some of the best sources of information in your particular information niche (a few blogs in my Google Reader include Entreprenur Magazine, Change.org, Good Magazine, Seth Godin’s Blog, and NextBillion). Every morning, thanks to Google Reader, I’m able to go through over 20 blogs and pick out the best 5 articles 15 minutes. This process benefits me independently of tweeting since I quickly get updated about all the happenings of the social enterprise space.

4. Auto-Pilot. You want to be visibly reliable. That means tweeting several times a day. But how can you do that without wasting your whole day, ensuring that you are able to space out your tweets for maximum visibility? Get a free account with a service like SocialOomph (formerly TweetLater), which allows you to schedule your tweets. I spend 15 minutes reading through articles and another 15 scheduling tweets for throughout the day.

5. Always give credit. If you really want to develop a following, avoid self-marketing and focus most of your posts on retweeting. Whenever you tweet anything, make a serious effort to give your source(s) of information credit. Include both the author of the content and the source if possible (e.g. “An example tweet” by @author via @source). If you find information that didn’t come through twitter, search for the author’s name in google to find if they have a twitter account (i.e. type in “John Doe twitter”). You’ll find this helps you to connect with the people you credit, that it boosts your credibility as a tweeter, and that people are grateful (so they are more likely to follow you). To quote Guy Kawasaki (who has over 176,000 twitter followers), “retweeting is the best form of flattery these days.” Even Guy loves having his messages spread virally. If you really want to do your favorite tweeters a favor, recommend them to your followers with the #followfriday or #ff hashtags (e.g. “For great #socent tweets, check out @socialedge #ff). All the marketing you provide others on twitter helps you build up credibility and improves your ability to contact your niche’s experts.

6. Listen to your followers. Give new followers the opportunity to tell themselves about you over direct message. Never start a connection over twitter by directing people to your website or asking them to support your blitzkrieg fundraising campaign. Ask them what lights them on fire and what they want to learn more about. Through this feedback, you KNOW what your followers find interesting (which can guide what you tweet about). If you learn about a follower whose passions align with yours, you may strike up an email conversation or even a phone call that leads to a meaningful relationship! Some of our best connections with potential Unreasonable Fellows, mentors, and pipeline partners happened thanks to a few direct message exchanges.

7. Make it easy for others. The viral component of twitter is its concision. You can pour through enormous quantities of information at a blazing pace and make decisions about what you want to learn more about, what you want to share with your followers, and who you want to connect with. Make it easy for people to make the decision to share your tweets and to connect with you. Shorten your tweets so that others can retweet them without edits (don’t exceed more than about 120 characters). Use hashtags so people can quickly identify what you’re generally talking about (we often use #socent for “social entrepreneurship and #bop for “bottom of the pyramid”) and find your tweets when they search in a specific information niche. Follow people back so they continue to follow you (though not blindly – with automated follow on, you’ll find you pick up a good number of scantily-clad women and money-laundering schemes). A little twitter thoughtfulness goes a long way!

So What? Ultimately, if used right, twitter gives you the chance to connect with the most savvy, knowledgeable people in the space you’re passionate about. When you provide those in your field value consistently, you gain their trust as a source of information. With that trust, you have a credible brand that even the giants of your field recognize (and have benefited from, since you’ve been retweeting them). By using twitter well, you develop a supportive network to which you can market, learn from, share resources with, and team up with to systematically tackle the world’s greatest threats.

We’d love to hear your stories of great twitter connections, other tips you have for using twitter, your vitriolic distaste for our suggestions, and all other relevant thoughts in the comments section!

Each week, the amount a donor can give to any single entrepreneur on the marketplace is capped. The first week, this cap is $10, the second week it’s $50, the third week it’s $100, and so on (until the last two weeks, when there is no maximum contribution limit). This means entrepreneurs will have to galvanize the support of hundreds of people from around the world to raise the full amount and earn a seat at the Unreasonable Institute.

So this post includes our 5 tips for reaching hundreds of people and enlisting their support, based on our experience attracting applicants (almost 700 young entrepreneurs from 50 countries began applications before we ran our first Institute).

1) Maximize Your Strengths. Galvanizing the support of hundreds require you take full advantage of all the assets at your disposal. Let’s consider, as an example, a compelling concern one of our finalists raised on the phone with me this morning. She’d just run a fundraising campaign over the holidays and asked hundreds of donors for financial contributions. She understandably feels it’s inappropriate to ask them for funding yet again to raise $6,500. I totally agree. However, this donor base is not only a source of money, but also an incredible marketing base! Instead of emailing these donors to ask for contributions, this finalist should do the exact opposite. She might email them saying “Please do NOT make a contribution. Instead, tell five people you know about the opportunity to sponsor our venture on the Unreasonable Finalist Marketplace.” This strategy makes sense considering that an entrepreneur on Kickstarter (the online fundraising marketplace that inspired our marketplcae) receives the majority of her funding from contacts of her contacts. You might be surprised how many ways you can leverage your assets!

2) Find the Hubs. As a young startup, the Unreasonable Institute lacks a number of important assets including a credible brand and a proven track record. But in the 6 weeks our applications were open, nearly 700 young social entrepreneurs from countries like Mauritania, Benin, and Serbia, began applications to attend our ten-week summer institute. As much as we’d like to, we can’t take credit for getting the word out to so many applicants. Instead, all the recognition goes to our partners, organizations and individuals around the world that are trusted hubs for young social entrepreneurs (i.e. places social entrepreneurs already go to). These organizations, including Ashoka Changemakers, SocialEdge, and Change.org, helped us to market to their networks by tweeting, blogging, and emailing on our behalf. In total, our 28 partners spread information about our applications to well over 100,000 people. Targeting individuals with vast networks, organizations like the ones we mentioned above, local websites, meet-up groups, communities and blogs where the people you want to attract already go will lay the foundation for your viral call to arms!

3) Give Them the Tools to Market For You. To make it easy for our partners to spread the word about our applications, we did all the hard work for them. We sent them short blurbs they could email their networks word-for-word, 120-character tweets they could post on their accounts, materials (e.g. our logo, video, and diagrams) they could use to blog, and banners they could embed in their websites. By simplifying outreach for our partners, we also opened the door for their networks to spread the word. In fact, 42% of our applicants heard about us from organizations and people we’d never directly contacted (further evidence for Kickstarter’s observation that friends of friends provide the most support). The easier your message is to spread, the more it will.

4) Create a Sense of Urgency. According to John Kotter, author of the aptly titled A Sense of Urgency, any effort to create change is doomed without getting people to see and feel a need for change. Why should people sponsor you to attend the Unreasonable Institute? Because if you are one of the first 25 Finalists to raise $6,500 you receive rigorous entrepreneurial skill training, seed capital, mentorship from 50 seasoned entrepreneurs and investors, legal advice, prototype consulting, web development, a global support network, and the chance to pitch your venture to over 200 investors and philanthropists. No big deal. Oh, and you only have 50 days to edge out the competition!  Including specific goals and deadlines for action also incentivizes your supporters to move quickly (e.g. “Help us reach our goal of raising $500 by Friday by being one of 10 donors to give us $50!”).

5) Make the Ask. According to Dan Zarrella’s blog post 5 Steps to Going Viral on Twitter, the tweets that are most often re-tweeted (shared by other twitter users with their networks) include a request to be retweeted. Similarly, your contacts are more likely to help if you make a request of them that is (1) easily actionable and (2) “sticky.” (1) An actionable request includes specifics. For example, instead of asking people to spread the word about Unreasonable Institute applications, we asked them to get one person they know to apply. (2) In order for people to act, they have to remember your request. According to the book Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath, making your request memorable, or “sticky,” is best done through a Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional Story (SUCCESs). Check out our blog post on the subject for more details on how to nail these six principles.

So What? Catalyzing collective action is a vital skill for any successful entrepreneur, Unreasonable Institute Finalist or not. These five key strategies enabled us at the Unreasonable Institute to find our amazing 42 Finalists! We hope you find them useful as well! We’d love to hear other suggestions for rallying support in the comments section below!

One Actionable Request - Go back to the top of this blog post and retweet it. Not only do we advise you on what to do to mobilize hundreds of people, we also offer an example of what not to do. Never ever write a blog post this long. Do, however, communicate its core message in 140 characters or less by retweeting it!

Oh, and always say “Thank You”…thank you!