Tweets, Retweets, and Entrepreneurship

This case looks into how to effectively engage audiences through social media marketing. Specifically, the case addresses how entrepreneurs can use Twitter to generate community awareness through tweets and retweets. It also provides information about Twitter's history, format, and publicly available data analytics. Excerpt UVA-QA-0838 Mar. 6, 2020 Tweets, Retweets, and Entrepreneurship The Tom Tom Founders Festival (Tom Tom), which began in 2012, was born out of a question: how can live gatherings catalyze Charlottesville [Virginia] to generate new ventures, products, and visions of its future? Modeled after the popular South by Southwest (SXSW) festival held in Austin, Texas, each year, Tom Tom grew significantly in its first years. In 2015, the weeklong festival attracted over 25,000 attendees to the Charlottesville area, which had a significant impact on the local community. A team conducted an economic impact analysis in 2014 that estimated a net local economic benefit of over $ 800,000 associated with Tom Tom. The festival's staff used Twitter in conjunction with other social media platforms to attract and engage this audience. During the festival each year, the team noticed a significant spike in Twitter activity. In 2015, for example, mentions of @tomtomfest were up 466% during the 28-day period that included the festival. As a result, the team was interested in learning more about the characteristics of a tweet that made it more or less engaging, focusing on the use of keywords such as entrepreneurship. The team was interested in making the festival's outreach and engagement with the entrepreneurial community on Twitter more effective. Determining how often the festival's tweets were retweeted was an important metric to gauge the tweets' effectiveness. Understanding the Twitterverse . . .