I’ve talked a lot about the amazing Twitter community and all the support I’ve gotten during the whole kidney transplant process. A lot of people think Twitter is dumb, which doesn’t surprise me.
They think it’s inane, which to me just shows that they’re not following the right people, not tweeting enough or they simply aren’t engaging. Fine, it’s not for everybody and I understand that.
I see a lot of businesses who just don’t get it. They get frustrated because social media “doesn’t work” for them. It takes effort. It takes time. It also takes a LOT of practice & research. Just because you like to tweet from a personal account, it doesn’t mean you know what to do for a business. I am lucky that I got my job because of one of my followers. He knows what has to be done on Twitter, but he just doesn’t have the time. He knows a shitload, but I’m a bit more skilled and a marketing freak, so I got hired. Hooray for Twitter! I am very careful to keep the business pages separate from my personal account. Our bio clearly explains that both of us could be tweeting, but the people I’ve built relationships with know it’s me tweeting the majority of the time. I even put my name after some tweets to make sure it’s perfectly clear that it’s me saying it, not him. THIS HAS TO BE DONE to avoid confusion.
For the past 6 weeks or so, (a bit after my surgery), my sleep patterns have been messed up. I had been medicated for about a week and that’s really hard to bounce back from. So, I’m up late every night. Social media never sleeps & I have to have my “own time” to interact, so I do it after 11pm pretty much every night of the week. There is a group of about a dozen of us up late every night and we started using the hashtag “#PHXLateNite.” It’s built yet another community that I am involved in. So, a couple of the “members” of the group planned for a meetup last night. We started out at one of the Zipps locations in North Phoenix. I got there a little late and brought some friends with me. By using the #PHXLateNite hashtag, we were trending on Twitter, which is always cool. Well, another bar had seen us trending and invited us to go to their place (Canyon Club) so we all tabbed-out and headed over there. The place was DEAD. There were 2 people there. I’m not exaggerating. They gave us a private room in back, which was GORGEOUS. Really plush leather chairs, a couple pool tables and a lot of screens to show the videos of the music the DJ was playing. There were about 20 of us and after a couple of us asked about specials, they pulled out the happy hour menu and honored those prices. It was after 11pm, but they saw the value in a large group. I am pretty sure we would have left & given our business to someplace else had they not done this. That’s what businesses often forget: Take care of your customers & they will take care of you. There was even a woman who showed up, who knew NOBODY in our group, because she had seen the hashtag & trending topic. How cool is that????
Everyone was having a blast. The service was great (considering we were the only ones there, it had to be!) and the bartender, Johnny, is now the fodder of my dreams. Ha.
So, Twitter isn’t just about what you ate for breakfast. Or about whining about your recent breakup. It’s about building a community & making friends you can spend time with in person. In my case, I don’t know where I would be emotionally without all the Twitter communities I am involved in.
Twitter is magic. If it’s done properly.
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