Sharing our Story, 140 Characters at a Time

By Matthew Tremblay, Communications Specialist

In 2014, Time Warner Cable sponsored or hosted more than 175 community events in the areas it serves.  While many of the events we take part in are open of the public, most are for a specific group of students or kids in an afterschool program. In my role as Social Media Specialist, I have the opportunity to tell the story about our community efforts and the tremendous work of the not-for-profit organizations we work with to a large audience through Twitter.

By sending out live tweets with pictures from these events, my team and I provide our Twitter followers with a unique, first-hand experience to make them feel like they are there. One of the reasons “live tweeting” is such a success is that it allows my content to reach a much larger audience than just those in attendance.  By using social media I also have the opportunity to reach thousands of current and potential customers with each tweet. Through traditional forms of public relations or advertising I have to either rely on someone else, like a news outlet, to reach that many people for me, or pay for that much exposure. Through tweets from these events we had a potential reach of 12 million other Twitter accounts, last year alone!

If you are active on Twitter like I am, you know that many people’s tweets are spontaneous or off the cuff.  In our case, however, I know that the most effective tweets are planned ahead of time.  As with any good marketing or public relations plan, being strategic is the key to success. 

For each of our community events, I take the time to develop a thorough social medial plan with every tweet we anticipate sending out, as well as an idea of what pictures we’d like to be sent out with it. It also makes all the difference to incorporate Twitter handles of key people, partners and organizations. I’ve found that tweets that mention other Twitter handles garner many more interactions, (RTs, replies and favorites) because those accounts are now more likely to engage with my tweets, as well any people that follow them. Utilizing this methodology, we garnered close to 5,000 interactions from live tweeting at community events in 2014.

In addition, for each event I also think of unique hashtags that I include in its social media plan. One of the many reasons for doing this is so that I can better track the social media engagement and reach that we receive at each event. This helps me learn how to better craft our tweets and plans in the future.

As the adage states, “A picture is worth 1,000 words.” While Twitter may limit the number of words I can send out at a time, by getting our message out live, to a large audience, include both pictures and text, and at no cost, I could say that each of our tweets are worth way more than 1,000 words.