Best Practice Guide: Planning Twitter Parties
There’s a scene in the hit TV show How I Met Your Mother when Barney (the notoriously womanizer character) recounts a story of when no one showed up to his 11th birthday party. His mom, always ready to protect her baby boy, lied and said that she forgot to deliver the invitations. And 11-year old Barney was glad to know that it was his mother’s mistake and not something he did that caused his “friends” not to show up.
Moral of the story? You can’t force anyone to come to your party, especially little kids with big attitudes – and Mom may not always be there to catch your fall (or make up a little white lie). And that’s why, fast-forward to 2015, hosting a Twitter party requires lots of preparation and planning – so that you don’t need to explain to your boss why no one showed up.
Hosting a Twitter party requires a lot more than just announcing it to your Twitter followers, hoping they’ll participate. If done correctly, they can be one of the best mechanisms to boost brand awareness, gather momentum for a product launch, engage your customers and much more.
Before you think about hosting a Twitter party, here’s the best practice guide to making sure it’s the party of the year.
Give them a reason to show up
Barney’s mom won’t be around to explain why no one came to your Twitter party, so don’t let that happen. To host a successful Twitter party, you need to give people a reason to show up. If you’re launching a new product, you might want to give away a few free samples or some swag. You’re not limited to just your product too.
You could give away an exclusive opportunity for a Q+A with your CEO or perhaps a first-peak at the next product development meeting.
Find your influencers – and choose them carefully
Social media influencers in the Momsphere are people who have a large following of Moms and families reading their blogs and engaging with them on social media. Their advice is trusted – and if they’re promoting a Twitter party, their followers will want to attend.
This is one of the most crucial steps in planning your Twitter party because you need to make sure you carefully choose the right influencers that can be your brand advocates – and that you can trust to deliver your message.
One of the reasons why so many companies choose us, PTPA Media, to organize and plan their Twitter parties is because we have a network of thousands of social media influencers who we carefully screen for each Twitter party to make sure we find the right ones for each event who can tell your brand’s story and deliver your brand’s messages appropriately.
Reaching out to a blogger who claims to have 100,000 views a month but only generates less than one per cent engagement during the Twitter party won’t do much for your event. We carefully vet our bloggers (and even rank them after each event) to make sure that they’re generating a high level of engagement to the party.
We’ve seen companies pick the wrong bloggers and social media influencers who don’t stay in line with the brand’s core messages and unfortunately, what appears on social media stays on social media forever.
Choose a unique hashtag
Make it easy for people to search for your Twitter party and follow along by choosing a unique hashtag – it shouldn’t be too long since Twitter has strict character limits (140 per tweet – you don’t want a 20 character hashtag that takes up too much space in the tweet) and it should be creative. Think about choosing a few words that represent your brand.
Promote the event
A successful Twitter party is well promoted in advance and can mean the difference between achieving your objectives or not. In addition to calling out your upcoming Twitter party in your email newsletter, social media posts, blogs and more, make the event even more profitable for you by getting people to register in advance.
This helps you prepare and estimate the number of attendees you can expect and gives you the opportunity to collect names and email addresses and build your email subscriber database.
Moms, more so than other consumers, really trust brands that are authentic – so another great reason to pairing with PTPA Media for your next Twitter party is that we’ll handle the preparation for you and promote the event to our database of over 70,000 families who trust our communications and our partnerships.
Prepare for the day-of
Winging it might work at a bar, but it doesn’t work when hosting a Twitter party. You need to plan the event, including preparing a script with defined questions to keep the conversation flowing, minute by minute, in order for it to be successful. Having a prepared script also ensures you can create specific calls-to-action during the event (for example, one of your questions might garner a ton of tweets and follow-up questions which you can be prepared for with a relevant blog, resource or eBook at hand – driving inquiries and traffic to that link).
Don’t be afraid to have some rules!
Maybe you don’t want to have too many rules at a house party, but at a Twitter party, they’re a must. It’s important to have clear rules to make sure the event runs smoothly and keep all the participants on track. If you’re giving away prizes, you need to have rules to ensure people are eligible to win.
So… is anyone having fun?
Are people tweeting and sharing? Is your hashtag going viral? And is anyone having fun and would like to attend again? We’ll act as your party bouncers to make sure the event goes according to plan. In fact, the entire PTPA team (yes, including CEO and spokesperson Sharon Vinderine a.k.a. Mom extraordinaire) will be tweeting, sharing, engaging and moderating the Twitter party so you don’t have to worry about a thing. We’ll keep the audience intrigued and make sure to select the winners (and follow up).
Monitor post-event analytics
Once the event is over, you absolutely must measure how it went. Analyze your post-event analytics. Did you gain new followers? How many impressions did your tweets generate? What type of engagement did you see? Which topics interested your followers most? How many people followed through on a call-to action (signed up for your email newsletter, clicked a blog link, etc.)?
After every Twitter party that we host for brands, we also provide detailed analytics that dive into the impressions, clicks, engagement and traffic generated from every tweet and mention, making it easy for you to know exactly how it performed.
Sound like a lot of work? It doesn’t have to be. Let us take the party planning off your hands – here are some statistics from our most recent parties:
- Over 37 million Twitter impressions
- Over 12,000 engagements in one hour
- Trending in the top 5 positions in the U.S. and Canada
Download our media kit here to find out how we can help your brand launch your next product, generate engagement and exposure to over 70,000 moms and families.