Real time Twitter strategy

This will be a live(relatively speak­ing) series demon­strat­ing my actual use of Twit­ter as part of a mar­ket­ing and pro­mo­tion cam­paign. The cam­paign is for an arts orga­ni­za­tion I help, it’s name is Artists’ Cir­cle and it puts on three shows here in the Twin cities each year. The orga­ni­za­tion is entirely artist run their first show is com­ing up in March and the next in the sum­mer. The orga­ni­za­tion had very lim­ited web pres­ence until last spring when I set up their blog, they have lit­tle or no pres­ence on Face­book and until yes­ter­day did not have an active Twit­ter account.

The Strat­egy:

Step 1– get followers

Total time +/- an hour

• Find­ing and fol­low­ing  art friendly or artist twit­ter mem­bers who were geo­graph­i­cally acces­si­ble to our shows as either artists or poten­tial buyers.
• Listed the Artists Cen­ter Twit­ter page with Twel­low and Justtweetit.com

To do this I used: Twel­low and searched using Art and Min­nesota as key words which pro­duced a list of Twit­ter users in Min­nesota who listed them­selves under the cat­e­gory “Art”. I then skimmed the list­ing for active users, users who had tweeted reg­u­larly indi­cat­ing they were reg­u­lar users and clicked the “fol­low” button.

Because 99% of peo­ple being fol­lowed usu­ally fol­low back our fol­low­ers went from 0 to 20 in less than 24 hours.I’ll con­tinue look­ing for poten­tial fol­low­ers a cou­ple of hours a week max.

Step 2 Set– up the com­mu­ni­ca­tions chan­nels and sched­ule mes­sage releases

Total time a lit­tle over an hour.

To do this I used: Tweet­later.com and Hootsuite.com I chose to use both as a test but you really only need to use one. Hoot­suite allows you to have more than one Twit­ter account  but Tweet­later also uses RSS as a means of send­ing out your announce­ments… Either will work just fine.

Both set ups are shown below I used dif­fer­ent word­ing in each with a link back to the Artists’ Cir­cle blog. Since there are basi­cally two cam­paigns here

• Art at High­land on March 28 ’09
• Art at St. Kate’s on July 25, ’09

The mes­sages for each are slightly dif­fer­ent... Art at St. Kate’s is not until the sum­mer but the dead­line for artist jury sub­mis­sions is approach­ing. So those mes­sages are focused at artists who might be inter­ested in sub­mit­ting for jury review. After the par­tic­i­pants have been selected future mes­sages will be focused on attract­ing con­sumers to the show.

The fre­quency of the mes­sages is designed to trickle over time with a larger spread between mes­sages early on with the time incre­ment decreas­ing the closer to the event.

Remem­ber that once this is the only time the mes­sages will need to be set up. Once your net­work starts increas­ing in size the reach of your mes­sages also increases.

Tomor­row the next step will be to use Key words to trig­ger a mes­sage to be sent out.