3 Changes Every Black Fraternity and Sorority Chapter Needs to Make to Their Twitter Account Immediately

My name is Jonathan Rabb and I am the founder and CEO of WatchTheYard.com. Every week, me and my team get reached out to by hundreds of members of Black fraternities and sororities who want to have their chapter’s stories and achievements written up and posted on the website. Over the last couple of months, my team and I have realized that there is one small fixable problem that a lot of Black greek chapters have that could potentially be holding them back…drumroll…their Twitter accounts.

Yes, Twitter. Remember Twitter? It turns out, a lot of undergraduate and alumni chapters have Twitter accounts that they made between 2009 and 2011 that they are not keeping up to date or in the right shape. This is important because Twitter affects the chapter’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is complicated, but let me break it down right quick.

One of the major points of having a Twitter account is so people who are not in close proximity to the chapter or unfamiliar with it, can look it up and see what the chapter is up to. Think about this as your chapter’s platform to speak to the world. When local news stations or websites including Watch The Yard send their journalists to write a story on something your chapter has done, the first and easiest way to find out is by doing a google search.

Do you know what the first thing to pop up in most Black greek chapter searches on google is? The chapter’s Twitter account. It sometimes pops up above the chapter’s actual website. I don’t know why, but Twitter has the highest SEO out of all of the social media sites including Instagram, Facebook and that Black profile your prophyte made back in 2004 for the chapter, yeah you know the one, it is still up and that Ludacris song still plays when you open the page. (FYI last year Watch The Yard made its own BlackPlanet profile as a joke, you can check it out here.)

The problem is that while your chapter probably has a great Instagram account and possibly a great website, google thinks that the Twitter account is the most important to highlight. A lot of the time, because chapters are focusing on Instagram and Facebook, the Twitter, which is most important for the outward appearance of the chapter, goes unnoticed.

To help, I’ve created a list of things that you can quickly do to update your Twitter so that your chapter can win at SEO and branding.

Fix the Bio

You need to fix the bio. Almost 75% of the chapters me and my team come across on Twitter are doing their bio’s wrong. Here is what your bio should look like. If you want, you can copy and paste exactly this:

The [Name of Chapter and possible nickname] of [Name of org]

[Name of College it is at or area the chapter serves], [City it is located in]

Chartered on [Insert date]

[Contact email]

Here is an example using the Psi Chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi:

The “Progressive” Psi Chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi, Fraterntity Inc.

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis/St. Paul

Chartered on April 19th, 1924

info@PsiChapter1911.com

Then, if you want you can add in anything extra if you have enough space with the word count Twitter allows you.

The reason making these changes is important is because of the following:

1. Most people who don’t know your chapter really well, do not know it by its letters. People say “Morehouse Sigmas”, “Rutgers Iotas”, “USC Zetas”, and this is exactly what they search. Because of this, you HAVE to include the school or city the chapter is associated with in the bio. Trust me.
2. The charter date shows people how legit your chapter is. Most of our chapters are really old. Flaunt that.
3. Tweets are like small press releases. Make sure you give the person searching your chapter a way to contact the chapter formally in case they want to work with you, donate to you, or write a story on you. Give them an email address.

Link To your website

If your chapter has a website, please link to the website. Every Twitter account has an area to add links, do not let this space go to waste. If your chapter doesn’t have a website, put in the link for one of your other social media accounts like Facebook or Instagram. If you don’t want to do this, you can never go wrong with inserting the link to your organization’s national website.

Tweet something

It is so lame when we search chapters and see that their chapter has an account but has not Tweeted since 2015. That is not good. If your chapter does not want to deal with Twitter, just delete it. DO NOT just leave it up with no updates, it makes someone searching you think that you are not doing anything and remember this is important because it pops up at the top of google’s search.

One easy way to make the chapter’s Twitter look good is to sit down with something like TweetDeck.com where you can write out a bunch of Tweets for the next two months and schedule them to post automatically. A month worth of tweets could take less than 30 minutes to create and plan.

Don’t worry if you don’t have any chapter events to post, there are other things that you can tweet that are evergreen and won’t look old but will make your chapter look tip top. WatchTheYard.com is a perfect resource for this, because we have thousands of stories about achievements from people in your fraternity or sorority.

You can literally just look through our site and load a bunch of our stories into TweetDeck with captions on them like “The brothers of Kappa Alpha Psi are always achieving!” It will make your chapter look up to date, informative and engaged. Other things that you can tweet are pictures of members in your chapter accomplishing things. An example of this could be, “Congratulations to our Spring 14 Soror Brown on getting her Ph.D. in Sociology.” Let people know that your chapter is accomplishing things.

Another idea is to post historical facts and/or pictures from the past from your chapter or org. People, including your chapter’s very own brothers and sisters, will love to retweet these. Trust us, you might even go viral.

I hope this helps. I do this for the culture and I want to see us all winning, Black greekdom is such a special thing and we need to make sure that we are presenting ourselves to the world in the best way possible. If you have any questions or comments, follow me on Twitter or Instagram, I love to connect with fellow greeks and will give your chapter SEO advice, just tweet, comment or send me a message at @jonathanrabb (Twitter/Instagram).

Also, make sure to follow @WatchTheYard on Twitter, my team has created loads of Black greek content, articles about historical facts and videos that you and your chapter can retweet.

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