Twitter is today’s hot spot! Bill Gates, Ellen DeGeneres, Ashton Kutcher, CNN, your local news, and even your local radio stations and shopping malls, all have twitter accounts to grow their network of twitter followers. They promote themselves on twitter to generate new fans, leads, viewership, news hounds, and music listeners. Even the creator of R2D2 in Star Wars uses Twitter! Shouldn’t flyball players be doing the same?
You hear “Follow Us On Twitter!” every time you turn on the TV or Radio or visit a website!
This has caused an enormous avalanche of new twitter users signing up every second hungry to connect with like minded people! We who play flyball are always looking to connect with such "like-minded" people and their dogs.
Could we use Twitter to promote Flyball? Why not?
So, how does it work and how do we get started?
Create a Twitter Account
You cannot believe how easy it is and how much fun Twitter list building is!!!
If you already have a Twitter account, you can skip this step. If not, here is what you do:
- Go to Twitter
- Click on the sign up button.
- Follow instructions.
Are you going to flyball practice? Tweet that. Does your club offer flyball training? Tweet that. Are you leaving for a flyball tournament? Tweet that. Are you hosting a tournament? Tweet that. Are you participating in a demonstration of flyball? Tweet that. You get the idea....
OK. You have a plethora of activities and you have been tweeting them to let your friends and the public know where/when they can find flyball. What else can you do?
Hashtags #
Twitter makes it easy to identify "topics" that may be of interest to "tweeps". (People who use twitter are known as tweeps). To isolate a group of tweets by topic, users use a hashtag symbol (#) followed by the keyword you are interested in following. An example would be #pets. Any tweet about pets would contain #pets and would show up in twitter searches. However, #pets is too broad a topic to do much good for flyball so, doing a twitter search query for #flyball would reveal a more targeted group of tweets.
At the moment, there are only a few of us using #flyball but, we are growing in number as the word spreads. Hopefully, #flyball will become a "trending" topic for tweeps who do not necessarily participate directly in flyball but, who like to help a worthy cause along by "retweeting" informative tweets.
To post a "retweet" is to read a tweet and pass it along to your followers who might find an interest in it. Say you have people who are just interested in #dogs. If they know what flyball is and they see your tweet about an upcoming flyball tournament, they would "retweet" your tweet and therefore, might hookup your event with new people. Of course, you reciprocate by either thanking a "retweeter" in a tweet or "retweeting" one of their tweets. This is how Twitter grows interests & topics among its users and is the reason Twitter itself is growing so rapidly.
Common Topics on Twitter
Some common hashtag topics you will see are #pets, #dog, #dogs, #cats. Some less common but, equally effective at helping you to locate tweeps to follow are #woof and #Fursday.
#Fursday refers to Thursday where cat & dog tweeps look to find new followers. The hashtags will show up in searches and you can be reasonably sure that tweeps using them have an interest in animals.
#ww or #WW refers to woof Wednesday. #FF is also #FollowFriday and that means you follow back anybody who begins to follow you. This is the way to build influence within Twitter. The more people who follow you, the more people have opportunity to read your tweets.
#Flyball
The hashtag topic #flyball is gaining because of one tweep who decided to promote it. @flyballtoday decided they wanted to harness Twitter to promote flyball but, the best way to do that was to create a searchable hashtag. Hence, #flyball was created. Flyball Today uses it a lot but, I happen to know that the people there would just be thrilled if other Flyball Teams, Clubs and individual flyball players would use it to draw attention to our sport. They check all the time and follow ANYBODY who uses it to reference the sport for dogs. (warning: some Baseball tweeps use the phrase "flyball" when tweeting about baseball)
Twitter Accounts of Interest to Flyball
By the way, I happen to be on Twitter myself. You can follow me at @chrisandblast. Want to follow my flyball team? @wooferines. If you are familiar with Flyball Today (Livestream channel dedicated to live and pre-recorded flyball action video) you can find them at @flyballtoday. All these #Flyball tweeps will follow you back!
Got questions? Post a comment! Want followers? Post a comment and let us know your Twitter ID!
Good Luck! Good Tweets! and, Good Racing!
