Our social media experiences often boils down to one question: Do you want engagement? On Twitter, it’s going to require a two-way relationship, with communication that addresses questions and comments from your followers. Guest post author Susan Perri sees a lot of self-promotion and lack of common courtesy lately on Twitter. She offers examples of tweeps using Twitter expertly for real engagement, and three simple rules for using Twitter well. Ultimately, it’s quality, not quantity, and the same rules from your childhood playground still apply. Make friends, be nice, take turns, say please and thank you. Oh, yes, and have fun while you’re at it.

The single most frequent question that I get from nonprofit organizations who want to use Twitter is "how do I get started?" My response is to follow The Twitter Rule: Less Broadcasting, More Conversation. The embedded slide deck includes strategies for using Twitter to create social capital and conversations.

Analyzing social sharing is critical- it's part of the feeback loop you need to gauge audience reach and reaction to your online content. In this blog post, I discuss four social sharing tools that offer in-depth sharing analytics: AddThis, Facebook Share, Tweetmeme, and Google Analytics Firefox extension. What other tools do you use to analyze how your readers share your organization's content online? What do you learn from them?

Fan and follower numbers mean nothing without engagement. In this case study, I analyze why a company with 4,000 Twitter followers and almost 500 Facebook fans is failing at social media.

Engagement is critical to creating stronger organizational relationships, but it is relatively difficult to really engage followers on Twitter. Having a conversation with followers is one of the easiest way of engaging, but it is hard to have a conversation with every one of your followers. Here are five ways that nonprofit organizations are creating spaces for real engagement on twitter.

A new set of data shows that Twitter drives one in every five visitors to social networks, and more visitors to blogs than the search engines do. How can you take advantage of this knowledge? This post analyzes the data and offers suggestions for better Twitter usage to take advantage of this information.

What are the pros and cons of using Mr. Tweet to help your non-profit get the most out of Twitter? Does Mr. Tweet, "your personal assistant." help non-profits find key influencers? I look at how non-profits are using Twitter, the value of an assistant like Mr. Tweet, and other resources for connecting to non-profit Twitterers.