In case you missed it, here is the invitation for the 2015 Food Allergy Awareness Party. Be sure to use #foodallergy during the party in order to participate and for partygoers to see your tweets.If you are interested in entering the prize giveaways, you must RSVP to the party invitation and complete the entry form linked there.
Below are my Twitter Party tips, in case you are a little unsure how to "attend" one. It's easy!
Twitter Party Tips
If you're new to Twitter, attending a
Twitter Party can seem pretty complicated and even a bit daunting. Fear
not! A couple of easy steps, and you'll be ready to watch the Tweets
fly, and maybe...before the hour's up, you might even decide to Tweet
too!
Basic Twitter Tips
If you think you might want to
Tweet during the party, you will need to get a Twitter account. It's
free and easy to do. They don't require much personal info at all to
open an account. Just visit www.twitter.com and click on the Sign Up
button on the right. You will be asked to provide your full name, a
user name, a password and your email address. Having a Twitter account
means you can Tweet a message to everyone and anyone on Twitter,
provided you keep it to 140 characters or less in length. You can follow other people on Twitter who you think have interesting things to say and likewise, people can follow you! If someone unseemly follows you, you can always block them.
When you rest your cursor on a tweet on your screen, you'll see you have the option to reply or retweet. If you read a tweet that you think is worth repeating to your followers, you can retweet. You'll see the tweet with a RT in front, ready to send. Hitting reply
automatically puts the screenname of the Twitter user you are replying
to at the beginning of your Tweet. For example, if you reply to a Tweet
from me, your reply would begin "@FoodAllergyBuzz". If you see a Tweet you want to save, click on the star to "favorite" it.
Attending a Twitter Party
So, you've signed up for
Twitter. You get how to reply, retweet, favorite, and tweet. How do you participate
in the Twitter Party? A few important things will make it easy for you.
Hashtags
First, you need to know what the
hashtag is. For the Food
Allergy Awareness Week Twitter Party, we use #foodallergy. That means all tweets
intended for the Food Allergy Twitter Party must include "#foodallergy"
in that 140 character tweet or the people at the party won't see it!
Using the hashtag enables everyone there to filter out tweets unrelated
to the party. The tweets tend to come fast and furious during Twitter
parties. It can be difficult to keep up. The last thing you need is
unrelated Tweets interspersed with Twitter Party Tweets. That'll just
confuse you and make your eyes go buggy!
Twitter Search
If you want to keep it simple,
use Twitter Search. You can just type #foodallergy into the search box
on the right side of your twitter page about a third of the way down.
That brings you "real time" search results for tweets with #foodallergy.
Sometimes it does not refresh as fast as you'd like, and you'll find
it's difficult to keep up because while you're waiting for your search
results to refresh, people are still tweeting away. It keeps things
simple and uncluttered, though, and you can keep your Twitter page open
in a separate window in case you wish to Tweet, Retweet, or Reply.
Twitter Dashboards
If you are comfortable with a
very minimal amount of learning an application/tool, try a Twitter
Dashboard, such as Tweetdeck or Tweetgrid. There are many. I find using a
Twitter dashboard makes it easier to keep track of replies, direct
messages, and #foodallergy tweets simultaneously. I recommend
Tweetdeck--it's free and simple to use. For the party itself, I recommend using 3 columns: Mentions,
Direct Messages, and a column for #foodallergy search results. That way, you can see all of the relevant info
simultaneously.
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