If you are running a charity and have not started using the power of Social Media then it is time to get started. There are so many advantages to having a presence in Social Media that it would fill a book, but we are going to talk about that here, we focusing on just trying to promote your silent auction through using just Twitter, not even your Facebook Fan Page .
First thing to do is try to start the buzz for your silent auction event way before it is ever happening. Start with sending out updates to when the auction will be taking place. But the goal here is to try to keep it vague. You want to have a reason for your twitter followers to want to click on your link leading to your website. It is not enough to just put up that you have made a new blog post. It has to be intriguing and make people almost not feel complete without clicking on the link in your tweet. For example you could do something of the following:
(Your Charity) gets involved with Elves, Turkeys & Lots of Wine, What is Going ON? (put the link here)
Now from this tweet it is hard to not be curious to what exactly you are talking about. It sounds so ludicrous, that to just let that tweet go on by is not going to be easy. Anybody would want to see what is going on with this. When the person lands on the weblink you included with the tweet you will want to take them to a page that is a blog post about your upcoming Christmas gala, where of course you will probably have Christmas decor, some turkey to eat and then of course a bar. Once they get to the page there is a sense of relief to finding out it is a silent auction. However it is a great idea to have people be placed on your charities mailing list to see about further information coming out soon.
Once people start to join your mailing list you can see if they can help you with getting items donated or getting them involved one way or another. The goal here is to develop the relationship through twitter and then move them to your mailing list, where they can keep up with all of the things you will be doing at your charity event.
Another way to use Twitter once you start getting items in for your silent auction is to tweet about the items that will be on display. This might encourage people to want to attend just so they can bid on that item. While at the same time it is giving your charity more exposure for the event, while still sending out interesting tweets and not just boring everyday news.
There are many other ways to really get your charity exposure on twitter for the upcoming silent auction but you will just have to get creative. One that sees to work really well is using the power of tweetpic and doing a kind of picture diary of the setting up of the event all the way to the end of the event and breaking it down. Doing updates every day or so, people will tend to wait for your tweets if this is the case, and pictures and videos have a lot better chance of being retweeted than say regular text will ever have.