Last weekend’s Berkshire Hathaway tweeting provided us a great communications laboratory with several lessons learned. Talk about a case study in multiplatforms and social media. Here’s what happened:
Last summer, Leigh Fatzinger of OMV in Seattle began following Business Wire on Twitter. Like many companies, we jumped on Twitter, but nobody really owned the feed and updates were few. It’s different now, but then, no one actively tweeted, so Leigh “unfollowed” us.
OUCH. That’s like saying: “Take me off your mailing list.”
Leigh Fatzinger
But it’s OK. On Thursday, April 30 at 9:16 AM Central Daylight Time, we posted our plans to tweet live from the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders meeting. In that blog post, we invited people to follow us on Twitter. Those who did would be entered in a random drawing to win a set of collectable Warren Buffett posters available only at the meeting.
On Friday, May 1, at 1:58 PM, Lauren Linscheid in Business Wire’s Seattle office touted the blog post, ”How Tweet It is to Attend the Berkshire Hathaway meeting,” in an email blast.
Leigh saw the email. ”I thought that was a really good headline,” said Leigh, “so I clicked on it and read all the way through to the bottom and learned about the contest.” At 2:49 PM, Leigh began “following” us again.
- The headline is really important. Just like a press release, what you choose to put in the ‘tweet spot’ matters–even moreso when you only have 140 characters.
- It PAYS to experiment. The drumbeat of social media is: you must participate to understand. It’s true. We had no idea how this would turn out. In this case, it worked.
- There are no silver bullets. All these tools, tactics and platforms work together. This has come up repeatedly in our webinars. People want a single, one-size-fits-all answer. Not gonna happen.
So…Leigh. Congratulations to you! And thanks for helping us learn a bit more about how to use Twitter.
Posted by Monika Maeckle 
