Using Twitter for Trivia: A User’s Guide
Since launching our official TrivWorks Twitter feed in 2009, we’ve utilized it for a variety of purposes: marketing upcoming free trivia nights, highlighting news items & achievements of fellow event professionals and live trivia hosts in New York City and beyond, as well as to promote the daily blog you are reading now. However, as a trivia company we also use it as a means of engaging with our audience on a daily basis by providing a steady stream of fun trivia questions for people to enjoy.
There are plenty of great daily trivia feeds on Twitter: @AnswersDotCom, @OMGFacts, our TrivWorks “Special Host” @PatKiernan and even @MasterCard come to mind. However, having tweeted trivia every single day for almost two years, I’ve learned a little something about how to ask realtime Twitter questions in order to maximize engagement with an online audience.
Below are some pointers to make your Twitter trivia feed shine as brightly as it possibly can:
1) Be Consistent – Like any other aspect of social media, consistency is key to maintaining an audience. If you’re going to tweet multiple questions a day, do so. If you’re like Pat Kiernan and tweet one question at the same time every day, keep to that schedule. Your following will reward consistency, but will abandon you quickly if you start deviating from your established pattern.
2) Use Appropriate Hashtags – In order to broaden your Twitter reach beyond your following, be sure to always use the #trivia hashtag, as well as appropriate hashtags for the content of the trivia- be it #movie, #tv, #popculture or #history, there’s an audience of trivia lovers out there just waiting for your awesome questions!
3) Mix It Up – Different people enjoy different types of trivia. While I’m tempted to ask lots of pop culture questions, I know that people also enjoy geography, current events, politics and a plethora of other topics. Keep things spicy by adding variety, and keep your followers on their toes.
4) Never Repeat Questions – If you have a broad and active following, they won’t like it if you ask the same question multiple times. Keep things fresh – there’s an entire world of trivia out there, so take advantage of it!
5) Include Different Media – I’ve found that people respond well not just to tweeted questions, but also to “Identify This” photo questions, with a shortened link to a photo of something. Also, music trivia is very well received – if the question is about a specific song, I often include a “spoiler” link to the answer, typically going directly to a song video on YouTube.
6) Offer Incentives for Responding – Give people a reason to respond, other than just setting their minds at ease with the knowledge that they got an answer right. I often tweet that the 1st to @ me with the correct answer wins a retweet to our followers- a nice incentive indeed! I sometimes spice it up by offering to RT the winner’s choice of trivia question, quote or link as a prize as well.
There are a bunch of other tricks I’ve discovered for maximizing engagement while tweeting, but these are the core tips to follow if you seek to reach your following with trivia questions. What other ways can you think of to make Twitter questions more fun and engaging?