• Follow Football

    Thursday, May 17, 2012

    Athletes and teams have some of the most followed accounts on Twitter - like @FCBarcelona, with close to 5 million followers, and @Kaka, who has more than 10 million. It has been an especially exciting month for English football. The Chelsea match against Barcelona broke our Tweets Per Second record for a sporting event, with 13,684 TPS, and the final Premier League games of the season were followed closely - on TV and on Twitter. So what can we learn from the way these teams and their players, use Twitter?

    Get engaged

    Twitter lets people get in touch directly with the athletes and teams they care about, and the best way to reward fans and followers is to engage. That could be through a simple @ reply from a star player, or a more formal Q&A where questions are answered live on Twitter. A great example of this is the recent #askvincent Q&A with Vincent Kompany from Manchester City, which was filmed and later posted on the @MCFC Twitter page.


    Engagement can also come in the form of exclusive insight that fans otherwise wouldn’t have access to - like coach Patrick Vieira live-tweeting the hugely anticipated Man City game against Manchester United.

    Organise the conversation

    Hashtags are an easy way to organise conversations that might otherwise happen independently of each other. Manchester City brought its fans #together throughout the season with one very effective hashtag - which they promoted online and offline.


    And when they were crowned champions of England for the first time in 44 years, the team and the fans celebrated, #together.


    On Saturday, @ChelseaFC will compete in the Champions League final in Munich. The game will play out on the field, but it will also happen on Twitter. And fans who want to get involved, or just follow along, can do that through the hashtag #ChampionsLeague. Fans have been able to tweet encouragement for the team this week using #CFCMunich, with players and the manager viewing the words of support.

    So if you love football, follow along on Twitter.

    --Lewis Wiltshire, @LewisWiltshire

    Posted by @ at 7:36 AM

  • Tweet local

    Wednesday, May 16, 2012

    We had a great turnout at last Wednesday’s #LDNlocal event, where more than seventy entrepreneurs came together to learn about using Twitter to help grow their small businesses, and share their stories.

















    Russell Holmes and Vivek Bhatia, from ico design, spoke about how @ifancyasnog (Snog frozen yogurt) built buzz for their Covent Garden store opening by inviting users to tell them about their first snog via Twitter. From thousands of submissions, one-hundred were selected. The winners were welcomed at the store opening with a free Snog and enjoyed a slice of celebrity: their story on the pinkest wall in London.













    Sonja Todd explained how @TattyDevine used Twitter to get the word out when a larger company copied their designs by tweeting a link to a blog post. Tatty Devine’s followers came to their defense and before they knew it, the story was trending on Twitter and was picked up by the mainstream media. While the competitor had to withdrew three of the five pieces from stores; Tatty Devine built an even stronger relationship with their followers.




    Tim Wilkes described how @Timmys_Pies jumped on a trending topic (#BritishPieWeek) to spread the word about their pies. They created a competition for the wackiest pie and promised to make the one that made them laugh the most. While the lucky winner Jo enjoyed her Welsh tapas filled pie - Timmy’s Pies were put on the map. With humble beginnings in Chelsea Market - today they can be found in Harvey Nichols and Whole Foods.


    Twitter brings people closer to the things they care about - and often, that is a small business. There are many more examples just like these of local shops, cafes, pubs and restaurants connecting directly with their customers and reaching new audiences through Twitter.


    If you have a story to share or fancy joining our next #LDNlocal event, send a Tweet to @TwitterUK.

    Posted by @ at 5:22 AM

  • #UKOpenHouse

    Wednesday, May 2, 2012

    Last week, 120 engineers gathered at LBI in Brick Lane for the Twitter UK Engineering Open House. After making the place look sufficiently Twitter-y, we got down to business.



    TweetDeck’s founder, @iaindodsworth, kicked off with a quick welcome talk introducing the engineering efforts underway at Twitter UK.



    Then @danwrong, an engineer from Twitter HQ, discussed the use of hashbangs (#!) on Twitter.com and the decisions involved in the “PushState or bust!” approach.





    After Dan answered a bunch of questions from the crowd, @jmwhittaker and I took the stage to talk about TweetDeck, the tools and techniques used to build it, and what the future may have in store.



    The final session of the evening was lead by Twitter HQ designer @mdo and engineer @fat, who gave a Voltron-heavy guide to the open-source UI project Bootstrap.





    The UK Engineering Open House was a great way for us to meet some of London’s best developers, and we hope it provided a useful look into the kinds of challenges and opportunities our team faces every day. Thanks to everyone who turned up, and for those that couldn't make it, you can find us on Twitter: @TweetDeck and @TwitterUK.

    We're hiring, so if you’d like to #JoinTheFlock, please check out the international jobs site.

    --Tom Woolway (@tomwoolway)

    Posted by @ at 6:14 AM