As about 150 turtles crossed JFK airport’s runways on Wednesday and delayed several flights, a Twitter account emerged to crack jokes from the turtles’ perspective. The account, agreed publications from the L.A. Times to the Huffington Post, was worth a good laugh.
Its creator, 26-year-old digital media director Noah Chestnut (right) tells Mashable that it was also a good case study for creating engagement on Twitter.
âThis was an opportunity to really see the viral moment and direct it to an extent, as well as just learn about how people engage with it,â says Chestnut. In his work at a public affairs and communications firm Hamilton Place Strategies, he typically handles less viral topics.
Throughout the past two days, he tweeted as @JFKTurtles and earned Twitter attention from the giant followings of Josh Groban, Katie Couric and ABC World News. Project Runway judge Nina Garcia made a runway joke too.
Eventually #JFKTurtles started to become a hashtag for the incident, with major news organizations like the Wall Street Journal and NBC using the handle in headlines that they posted to Twitter. And all sorts of media began referring to the “JFK Turtles” when discussing the story.
About 80% of the 8,000 or so people who followed the account were women, Chestnut says. And 60% of them were between the ages of 22 and 33. He has not lost many followers despite tweeting frequently. “Engagement is good and constant tweeting isn’t bad,” he says.
He also found the oft-cited optimal time for tweeting, between 4 p.m. and 5:30 p.m., to hold true for the turtles. During that time accounts like Audi, Microsoft and Hotels.com tweeted at him.
But the biggest lesson, he said, might be that creating an amusing or beneficial account premise is more worthwhile than nitpicking specific social media messages.
“People weren’t as amused by what I was writing as they were with the idea that the turtles were tweeting,” he said.
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