You have started a tweetup. Now, you are looking for ways to help your tweet-up grow and reach further into your community. Here are suggestions for how to nurture you tweet-up.

• Before You Start: You organize a tweet-up. Your tweet-up is growing and you want to help it grow.
• Learning Level: 4 | Creating Solutions
• Article Last Updated:  Sunday, December 4, 2011

Growing Your Tweet-Up

A tweet-up is an event, and organizing any event takes work and planning. As your tweet-up starts to grow, there are some things you can do help it grow and reach into your community.

• Write business reviews. Encourage your attendees to write reviews of the places you visit on local review sites like Yelp or Citysearch. Assuming you get good service, this would be a huge boost for the venue. In fact, when you start calling venues to schedule upcoming events, you can mention that they can expect several reviews after the event.
• Establish regular locations. When you find a venue that everyone likes and that gives you good service, consider returning there. Or even making it your permanent home.
• Contact the media. Tell your local media about your tweet-up. We have several members of the local media who attend our tweet-ups, and we’ve been covered in the local papers more than once. Non-Twitter users are surprised to learn that people use Twitter (and other social media tools) to make real life contacts. In fact, one of the tweet-ups I attend was given a Best of Phoenix award in 2009.
• Sweeten the pot. Ask your venue for specials. If you expect 20 or more people, the venue may be willing to give you some happy hour sorts of specials. If you have been there before, and it was a good experience for the business, you can expect the deals to get even better.

On the other side, if you are hosting a tweet-up at your business, here are some things you can do to help grow your tweet-up.

• Use a hashtag. Having a hashtag for your event makes it possible for people to find tweets about your tweet-up from everyone on Twitter, not just the people they follow. Create a hashtag and use it consistently.
• Expand beyond Twitter. Post signs in your business that you host a tweet-up with the hashtag and details. Consider creating a Facebook event for your tweet-up, and consider using an online invitation service like Twitvite or Eventbrite.
• Assign someone to the event. Make it someone’s job to not only supervise and provide customer service for the event, but also to promote the event online and engage the community between events.
• Get feedback. Ask people at the event and between events how things are going. You might be surprised to learn about small details that impact the tweet-up experience like limited parking or the music is too loud to talk. Make it your job to fix these small inconveniences.
• Give people a reason to come back. Offer specials for the people attending the event. You may also want to try new things with this event, such as partnering with related businesses to offer coupons and deals for tweet-up attendees.

The important thing is to have fun! It’s much more fun on Twitter when you know the people in your community in real life. So take a risk, set up a tweet-up, and meet new people.

Your turn: What have you learned as your tweet-up has grown? Share you stories with the community.

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• Organize A Tweet-Up!
• 10 Ways To Build Your Local Twitter Community
• Create A Facebook Event
• Twitter Hashtags
• Conference and Trade Show Tweeting
• Keeping The “Social” In Social Media
• Local Customer Checklist