I'm going to start off this blog post with a quick video message from Grandma Vivi:
You bet she has her own website as well as a Twitter handle. If a retired school teacher from Florida has a handle, you officially have no more excuses for not having one. Grandma Vivi's problems are parallel to our problems: she wants to connect to her grandkids, and we want to connect to our readers. In both cases, traditional methods (calling & passively having a website) have failed us. It's time to move into the brave new world of social media--especially Twitter. And why "especially" Twitter? I have an infographic!
So Twitter is basically a crowded room full of people that would be willing to connect with brands. Combine that with Cura's focus on social justice (which, as evidenced by the #INeedFeminismBecause and #INeedMasculinismBecause hashtags, is a great way to get Twitter users actively engaged and shows just how large the social justice community is on Twitter), and we have a core audience that is essentially waiting for us to engage them.
The questions is, how? Obviously we're doing well mining content from our own website to use for Tweets, but it's not enough to dig deep--we also have to spread out. Electric Literature, one of the most successful literary magazine Twitter accounts, pulls in lots of links and content from OTHER similarly-minded websites. They're getting the audiences of those sites to come over to them. We could do the same thing by retweeting from places like the ACLU or Housing Works Bookstores.
Beyond that, we need you, dear Cura staff member, to make a Twitter, follow Cura, and tweet at us and retweet us so new people can discover the magazine. We already know how great the work we're doing is--it's time to share the wealth!