The Warrior Dash looks like a very cool race. A bunch of my friends ran it last year and had a great time, so I signed up as soon as I could this year. I’m very excited about the race, but I’m very disappointed in how they manage their Twitter account; all talking, zero listening.
On July 13, they tweeted that registration was now open for the “Southeast” race next May. They have 3300+ followers, over 800 tweets, and seem to use TweetDeck to handle most of it (indicating that they’re likely somewhat Twitter-savvy).
In the five days since that post, here are a couple of the questions that people directed to @WarriorDash:
- soleoblues @WarriorDash — Is your registration site experiencing issues? Friend and I tried to sign up earlier today and kept getting error messages. (link)
- JMAC1775 @WarriorDash any swimming involved in Mountain City, GA event? (link)
Beyond that, a few others asked questions of them but didn’t use the @ correctly. A simple search would pull these in (which is a breeze in TweetDeck). Here’s an example:
- marathonjohn Dear Warrior Dash, I’m trying to register for you, but your website won’t let me. Boo and/or hiss. Regards, jrs. (link)
How many did the folks at Warrior Dash respond to? Zero. This isn’t a cheap race either ($40+ per person), so each tweet that helped these users would be worth around $40 to the company. Want to earn $40/tweet? Apparently they don’t.
Going beyond those tweets, there are many others that are opening contemplating the race (“should I do it?”). Jumping into those conversations should be a no-brainer as well. They might not sign up, but being easily available to answer their questions would probably help quite a lot.
Keep in mind that these examples are just for the past five days. Suppose that with proper support on Twitter, they could have gotten one extra sign-up per day; that seems quite reasonable, if not downright simple. That’s $40/day in extra revenue, or over $14,000/year. Find a part-timer to work 5-10 hours a week answering Tweets — they’ll make some money for their work, and the organization will still come out thousands of dollars to the positive.
If you’re on Twitter, listen and respond; it’s not just a bullhorn.
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