Should Your Brand Throw a Twitter Party? This hour-long event is a fantastic way to engage an audience while promoting your brand.
By Deborah Mitchell Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
When clients approach our team asking for effective ideas when it comes to social-media marketing, I always tell them to consider throwing a Twitter party.
Made popular by the mom-blogger community, a Twitter party is a strategic, live, quick-moving interactive online discussion using carefully produced tweets (140 characters) combined with product giveaways. A Twitter party is a great way to get your brand's message to thousands of old and new customers.
Related: 5 Reasons Your Followers Don't Engage With Your Tweets
Twitter is an ideal way to engage directly with your target audience. The audience reach and impressions from a well-produced party can be in the millions.
For me, producing a Twitter party is a lot like producing a television show, only the information and brand's story is being told online. The party is like "tweeting on steroids." The online "discussion" is driven by a host and happens on a specific day and time using a designated hashtag that allows anyone who is tweeting to follow it.
A well-produced Twitter party is a good way to put your business front and center on social media, allowing you to create new customer relationships and nurture current ones. It's a chance for customers to interact with you and your brand's team directly and learn more about your products and services.
Similar to a television program, the brand's background is researched beforehand and key tweeting points created, promoted and executed in an informative and creative way. Customers are invited to attend and RSVP to the hour-long online event, weeks in advance.
Finally, when it comes to valuable takeaway information, a lot of brand information can be shared in one hour of real time while you are receiving direct feedback from your customers.
Related: 5 Steps to Harnessing the Power of Twitter
Here are three tips to help plan a successful Twitter party:
1. Research and hire the right Twitter party team.
Your best bet is to hire someone to coordinate and produce your Twitter party. Experienced social-media experts, agencies and some bloggers know how to throw an effective Twitter party and provide you with the proper analytics report to measure your return on investment.
These professionals will also pull in your target social-media audience. Do your research, compare options and find the budget to hire the right team.
2. Have a specific theme for the party.
Each Twitter party is customized for a specific client and brand. Most parties usually last from one to two hours and have special guests and/or experts and giveaways. Know the key message you want to relay during the party, including any fun, relevant and informative facts about the brand/product/service to share with your audience.
3. Keep Your customized hashtag short.
A hashtag is a simple way of tracking all the tweets that are happening on a particular topic by a group of people -- in real time. A hashtag is the # symbol before a word (for example, #DMMABVI). Since tweets are limited to 140 characters, keep your hashtag short so your audience has room to retweet, reply and ask your brand questions during the party.
With the proper Twitter-party hashtag, clients can find the online conversation while it's going on and long after it's over.
Related: What You Could Learn From Katy Perry's Social Media Strategy
