Fremont Street Experience gets more retweets, likes, and comments on Twitter than big Vegas casinos do despite having vastly fewer followers (20K vs 150K or more.) Why? Because Fremont Street on Twitter has personality. It wants to engage followers and have conversations instead of just blankly broadcasting. It deliberately retweets from other accounts. It posts fun historical and quirky stuff. It’s fun to read. Contrast this with the big casinos who tweet at you, giving an overwhemling impression that you are a consumer who is expected to appreciate their awesomeness then spend money with them.
Scott Roeben, who runs the Fremont Street Twitter account talked about this last night at a blogging meetup last night here in Vegas. The big casino Twitter accounts are an example of how not to do social media. They just push content at followers. MGM, which owns multiple Strip casinos, often posts the same content on all their accounts. Yawn. There’s no attempt to get conversations going.
He says a great way to build Twitter traffic is to find much bigger accounts, find content they’d be interested in, then tweet about it, including their Twitter handle in the post. He used magician Penn Jillette, who has 2 million followers, as an example. Scott will tweet something of interest to Penn, who sometimes re-tweets it, bringing lots of hits and interest back to Fremont Street Twitter. The key here is it has to be real, something the celeb would be genuinely interested in. Don’t spam or annoy them.
Compare Fremont Street @FSELV to these biggies: @MGMGrand, @WynnLasVegas, @PalazzoVegas. Fremont has way more personality, is much smaller, yet get as much if not more retweets, etc.