Throughout August 2011, for the duration of the Edinburgh Festival, Boilerhouse mounted a twitter campaign designed to get people to go to see 88MPH a comedy show presented by Birmingham based theatre group Rogue Lounge at the Edinburgh Fringe. We wanted to see if we could mount a Twitter campaign that would have an immediate and measurable effect on audience numbers. The results (partly hard data and partly anecdotal) prove, at least to our satisfaction, that Tweeting can be a highly effective tool for promoting a (time limited) festival and a particular event within a festival.

Perhaps not surprisingly, as we sat and watched the #edfringe stream for a couple of hours each evening (5-7pm), we could “see” people making choices (whether to go to Edinburgh, when to go, how to travel, what shows to see, where to eat) based on information they were clearly getting from their own social media accounts. It was clear that information they had received from their own Twitter and Facebook contacts was pushing their consumer decisions and that these decisions – re-broadcast through the #edfringe hashtag – were having a knock-on effect on other punter’s decisions.

The number of #edfringe tweets per minute built up each evening (as people got home from work?) to a rate that Twitter’s server often became overloaded and the “Too Many Tweets” message appeared. The Boilerhouse TweetTeam named this daily phenomenon the TweetStorm. Despite the awful weather and the even worse economic situation Edinburgh ticket sales were up 3% this year. It is difficult to believe that the TweetStorm didn’t have something to do with this.

We only added our efforts to the TweetStorm on half of the 23 evenings that Rogue Lounge were performing. And, remarkably, on those evenings when we were “pushing” our messages, attendance at 88MPH was up by more than 50%. What did we do to achieve this? Well we can at least confirm that we now know that what you say, who you say it to and when you say it are all significant factors. The same is true, of course, for all successful promotional communications.