Afterthoughts on Hosting a Tap Influence Twitter Party

So last week during a lunch break I helped co-host a Tap Influence Twitter party with @WindowsPhone were for a 1 hour event they were talking about 4th of July vacations and used 6 questions to engage Twitter fans and gave away 1 Nokia Lumia 928 for each of the 6 questions.  This event was broken down into this type of format.

• Question
• 10 minutes of answers
• Winner chosen and announced
• Next Question
• 10 minutes of answers
• Winner chosen and announced
• …etc

It was superbly done and as a co-moderator I was overwhelmed with the 500-600 Twitter replies per minute, as many as 10-15 per second coming in during some of the questions to where every tool that I have ever used to manage social media communications was just barely keeping me in, responding, encouraging and reading as much as possible.

I leveraged Twubs as a replacement for Tweetgrid and Tweetchat but it has a limitation that it can’t handle multiple streams or columns and you can’t really manage replies to yourself in real time when you have that much traffic, I wish it allowed for a 2nd column just for handing responses to you so you could keep those in a separate column.

I used Hootsuite to manage my replies and direct messages, during the event in a window that consumed 1/2 of my 24" monitor screen, while Twubs at the fastest setting took up the other half.

I also used the Twitter website directly to follow @WindowsPhone and make sure everytime they sent out a question or answer, it was retweeted to capture as much audience and congratulated all the winners, actively asked questions, added my own replies and responses.

The hour went by so fast and I think I sent over 100+ tweets during the event, nearly 2 tweets a minute while reading and tweeting like mad. 

If I ever run a Twitter chat for DragonBlogger, I want to run it like this event.