The other night I attended a tweetup. What’s a tweetup?
A “tweetup” is a local meeting of Twitter users, usually announced ahead of time. Tweetups can take place any time or any place, and usually everyone in the area is invited. It helps give social networking a more palpable environment and allows local Twitter users to meet each other in person.
So why would you do this? Why would you want to publicly announce on twitter that you were going to be somewhere and that you wanted complete strangers to come meet you there?
A tweetup usually starts as a desire for twitter users to meet IRL (in real life). Sometimes it’s a group of friends, sometimes it’s just a random group of people.
The tweetup I attended the other night started out simply because my friend Tim (@tspatz) wanted to see his friend @newscred, who was in NYC from out of town, and Tim wanted some of his friends to meet him.
So Tim DM’d some of his friends on twitter with the time and place. This quickly turned into a tweetup when the conversation went public on twitter.
Everyone that had been invited was tweeting about the tweetup and the result was really interesting.
Just like anything else on twitter, tweetups spread in an interesting way. I like to call it the re-tweet effect. (it’s kind of like a game of telephone)
If I tweet something it has the potential to reach the 1,800 people that are following me. However, my friend can re-tweet it and then all of his followers will see it as well.
So at this tweetup we had a few different groups of people that had formed organically based on how the tweets about the tweetup went out.
The tweet I sent out looked like this:
sarahcooley: RT @WaltRibeiro: TONIGHT Lunasa NY 1st ave b/t 7th and 8th St. @ 7pm! Let’s do it! #tweetup #nyc I’m on my way there now!
But some re-tweets looked like this: