Want to grow your profile on Twitter? Want to grow awareness of your brand without spending a lot of money? Ever hear of a Twitterview but think it was a job interviewer with a twitch?

Maybe you should consider a Twitterview!

Recently I had the pleasure of being involved in my first Twitterview. Despite its buzz-termy sounding name, the concept is actually pretty simple: It’s an interview done over twitter. All questions & answers no longer than 140 characters.

So what’s the point of a twitterview?

Well the point is pretty simple too

Imagine you have a small, but growing twitter following, let’s say 500 people for example. Well that means that every time you send a tweet, it has the potential to be seen by 500 people (this is called ‘impressions’).

Ideally you’d like your tweets to have 500,000,000+impressions right?

Well what if you interviewed someone famous in your field who has over 100,000 followers?

And what if you asked them 50 questions, and both the question and the answer, carry your company branding?

And what if you asked 50 other people with 10,000+ followers to also tweet in questions (also carrying your company branding)?

Starts to sound pretty interesting doesn’t it? Oh, and it’s free.

This is a Twitterview!

So, recently for the football social game I work for, we decided to carry out a Twitterview involving a real life football star. This is how we did it and if it was worth doing:

Twitterview objectives

We had 3 core objectives for the Twitterview

1. Drive new users to our game I Am Playr
2. Increase awareness of I Am Playr
3. Increase our @iamplayr twitter following

All of these objectives were measured for success using real metrics (of course), by:

1. Deciding the correct metric to measure each by
2. Taking a pre-campaign baseline metric for each
3. Assessing the change in these baseline metrics after the Twitterview

I’ll go into detail into how these metrics performed a little further down.

Getting started – How to do a Twitterview

This was the first Twitterview I had been involved in, so I did a bit of research. There’s not a lot of good stuff out there about Twitterviews, but I found this article to be the best of a bad lot

Our Twitterview Plan

For our Twitterview we invited Lee Dixon – and ex Arsenal Football club legend, and current pundit on Match of the Day (the biggest soccer TV programme here in the UK) in to do a Twitterview.

We thought Lee was a good fit as:

• He had a strong Twitter presence of over 128,000+ followers
• He’s savvy media personality and people like to hear his opinions
• He’s an investor in our company, so we were able to persuade him to get involved 🙂

We put together a three step plan to get maximum benefit from the Twitterview to happen:

• Pre-interview (making sure people knew about it)
• During Interview (Making sure it ran smoothly)
• Post interview (prolonging the exposure of the Twitterview)

I have a step by step guide to exactly what we did during these three steps documented. If enough people request it I’m happy to share these here on the blog.

trending on #iamplayr

#I Am Playr

The core way the Twitterview worked was by people tweeting in questions using the #iamplayr hashtag on each tweet. This hashtag allowed everyone to follow the conversation, and worked as awareness branding for us as I Am Playr is the name of our game (I’d highly recommend you doing similar). Lee would then tweet replies to people who posted questions to this hashtag – meaning every tweet in the Twitterview was branded with our soccer game.

Throughout the Twitterview we dropped in messages to the conversation with links to our game. We used bit.ly tracking links to track click throughs.

We promoted it across all our channels a week before a few days before and on the day of the Twitterview to make sure enough people knew about it.

The Twitterview

We ran the Twitterview 90 minutes, lunchtime of the football transfer deadline day here in the UK. We had Lee in the room with us, he answered questions and I typed them up and posted to twitter using his twitter account. We used Tweetdeck for this.

The Results

It was great fun and the results spoke for themselves:

• Total 774 tweets using #iamplayr during the 24 hours around the Twitterview
• Total impressions with #iamplayr: 14 million
• Total audience reached: 540,398
• Click-throughs to the game: 505
• Increase in Twitter followers: 360
• We were 5^th trending topic on Twitter
• The day of the Twitterview was the 2^nd highest number of Google searches for I Am Playr, ever!
• Other celebs Will Carling (ex England Rugby captain),  Zoo magazine (UK lads mag) and some other professional footballers began tweeting in, all of which have big influential reach and added to the fun

So it’s clear that the Twitterview was a success. But leaving the ‘vanity metrics’(see impressions) listed above aside, the number that really matters most was the 505 click through directly to the game (all of which were highly qualified UK based users, who are expensive to acquire through advertising).

And What Went Wrong?

Ok so we learnt a few things. Three main things were:

• Tweetdeck wasn’t able to handle the number of tweets and was lagging up to 20 minutes behind real time & kept crashing. It was a clear case of ‘victims of our own success’. Next time will need to use a more powerful twitter client
• We originally began by RT’ing the questions and then answering it – but we got negative feedback from people, saying their timeline was being clogged up – so we changed to just @replying directly to answers with #iamplayr. People seemed to prefer this.
• Be prepared that you’ll get some nutters saying stupid stiff in the conversation. We (and Lee) thought this was funny, I wouldn’t take it too seriously – but something to consider if your client or company is uber sensitive

In Summary

Twitterview can be a really effective tool to raising exposure of your brand/cause and can drive real users through to your site. It was fun too.

If you have access to someone with a strong Twitter presence, I’d highly recommend it. However I’d be cautious about paying someone to do a Twitterview, as they’ll be receiving just as much exposure as your brand will be.

Your Turn:

Any further questions about how we did our Twitterview, or if you’ve any experiences to add to this – please post in the comments below.
Sample A

Sample B