Twitip

Today I’m feeling pretty amazed by Twitter and its capacity to sneeze word of a story, need and message far and wide.

In response to the bushfires in Victoria Australia (where I live) Sitepoint (a previous sponsor of Twitip) decided to put together an offer to raise money for the many thousands impacted by the fires. They are offering 5 of their books for the price of 1 for the next couple of days and donating every cent from the sale to the Red Cross.

Yesterday I went into the offices of SitePoint to see how I could help get the word out. We worked out a simple plan and about 16 hours ago from now I tweeted the offer. I’ve retweeted it myself a few times since so that my followers in different timezones see it – but other than that have left it to the Twitter community to spread word.

This morning I woke up to hundreds of retweets of the message. I count over 270 of them on Twitter search for the exact message and know that there are quite a few more with other versions of it where people added their own words. Add to that the many retweets of SitePoint’s on announcement tweet and those of many others who heard about it in other ways and from what I can see the link to the offer has been retweeted around 700 times in the last 16 hours.

The link is the most retweeted link on Twitter on both RetweetRadar and Retweetist.

I’ve always known the power of Twitter to spread a story or news and have experienced it to some degrees previously but this has been an amazing ride and one that I want to thank the Twitter community for jumping on board with. You all are amazing – thanks.

update: the goal of this project was to raise $50,000 for the bushfire appeal. It’s just been announced that in less than 24 hours it has already raised $75,000!

I’m very excited to welcome SitePoint (a great site for Web Developers, Designers and Online Publishers) as the first ever official sponsor for TwiTip.

You’ll see a couple of messages from SitePoint on our blog and one in our RSS feed. They highlight two offers that SitePoint are currently running. One is their Web Site Revenue Maximizer and another is their Free CSS Book giveaway promotion (for anyone that follows them on Twitter) that they spoke about recently here on TwiTip in a guest post on how they grew their Twitter followers from 0-10,000+ in a week.

SitePoint will be sponsoring TwiTip for the month of December – I hope you’ll support this blog by supporting our sponsors.

The Twitaway: An Experiment In Social Media

It’s never too late to build a large, loyal Twitter following—if you think outside the box. In this guest post, Matthew Magain from SitePoint shares some tips on how you can grow your Twitter following to more than 10,000 in less than a week.

I admit it: we were a bit slow to recognize the potential of Twitter at SitePoint.

Sure, a few of us had dabbled with personal Twitter accounts, but we never really acknowledged Twitter as a viable medium for communicating with customers until, well, everyone else was doing it! By the time we decided to jump on board, our preferred username had already been snapped up by an enterprising squatter (we had to settle for @sitepointdotcom). Not the ideal beginnings for building a successful Twitter presence—and more than just a little ironic considering we pride ourselves with being at the cutting edge of the Web!

Despite beginning on the back foot, we were able to attract 13,000 followers in less than a week—an impressive following that surpasses CNN and the New York Times.

Here’s how we did it.

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