Events Drive Social Media: The VMA Twitter Storm Spectacular

This past Sunday, MTV’s Video Music Awards were at the center of the twitterverse (Twitter universe). If you watched, you no doubt noticed how many times they would check the tweets related to the event. They tracked tweets for artists and then encouraged the audience and viewers to keep tweeting.

As of Monday night, there have been over 3.5 million VMA related tweets! The sheer volume is definitely impressive, the event hashtag itself averaging about 80 tweets a minute even now, over a full 24 hours later.

But what is this teaching us about social media? Social media responds to events. Last week a few of the top Twitter trends included Google’s birthday and roll-out of Instant Search, Beyonce’s birthday, Ramadan, and Rosh Hashanah. Sure there are those topics that trend like #lessonlearned or #dontarguejustacceptit, but the majority of powerful trending topics have something to do with specific people and events. It was incredible how you could literally track who was on stage at the VMA’s just by keeping an eye on Twitter. The response is nearly instantaneous and gives you access to millions of different perspectives. I only noticed Lady Gaga’s crazy meat dress because someone tweeted about it!

This has a lesson even for small businesses that most likely don’t have the influence to spur a million tweet Twitter storm. It shows us how important getting people together is and how physical, tangible events give people something to talk about. Whenever we put on a Salty Waffle social media class, there are always tweets going out about it. Those tweets spread to their followers and while that doesn’t result in a VMA-size takeover of Twitter, the reach generated from the personal networks of those in attendance is great advertising at an even better price.

Take a page from MTV, when you have an event, encourage people to tweet about it and share their experience. They will love being able to talk about themselves and tell everyone they know about how much fun they are having with you. You succeed when everyone else is talking about you and your business!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU04bgrL1_E[/youtube]