Grateful Lessons Learned from Tweetsgiving and Twitter
Tweetsgiving was built last year by small team Epic Changes in six days, launching a widely successful fund-raising effort that brought $10k towards building schools in Tanzania, Australia. At the heart of Tweetsgiving’s success was the power of Twitter. Released two days before Thanksgiving in 2008, Tweetsgiving quickly became a trending topic on Twitter and the spirit of gratitude was spread across the world through shared tweets.
As far as we have come in our American history, Thanksgiving remains a universal holiday staying true to that spirit of gratitude. Leveraging a widespread appeal to individual’s potential for graciousness and the promotion of a good cause, Tweetsgiving was able to expeditiously roll out a successful campaign, all thanks to Twitter.
It is kind of mind-boggling when you think about it. How can a microblogging platform rally so many people towards a singular goal?
The concept, mind-boggling as it may seem, has been reiterated time and again through the continued use of Twitter. Over the past year Twitter has displayed its worth when the world realized the microblogging platform’s ability to effectively disseminate information to every corner of the globe. The way in which an individual can effect the worldwide pulse of shared information is a powerful wonder in and of itself.
In addition to the Tweetsgiving initiative as a standalone project, the bulk of the social media blogosphere helped to raise awareness for Tweetsgiving. These combined efforts resulted in a well-publicized campaign.
I saw this effect firsthand when I was raising money for my own cause, turning to Twitter to seek out startups that would be interested in contributing to the project. Twitter proved to be the most effective way in which to spread the word about my cause and its associated book. Within the first three hours I had raised $500 in donations towards my cause.
It is because of this effect that Tweetsgiving was able to see so much success in such a short amount of time. Gaining the support of other influential bloggers and Twitter users enabled Tweetsgiving to get its message across to millions of users. All of these users are potential contributors.
Alas, there is an art to becoming this powerful on Twitter. Combining sincerity with the proper networking skills can take your cause to the next level. Executed properly, a sincere promotion run through Twitter can see a great deal of success. I discuss some of the basics surrounding networking capabilities on Twitter in my Twitter Survival Guide ebook, coauthored with fellow author Bob Walsh.
