SubscribeTwitter Invades Poker
March 28, 2009 – 6:06 pm
By: Matt Clark
I’m out in Vegas at the Dream Team Poker event. There are about 444 people in the tournament with a healthy number of pros. What’s really surprising is the number of people twittering the event — while they are playing.
I tried this a few weeks ago while playing a cash game in New York City@matthewclark. I found it difficult to keep up, but I was surprised at the number of people following me. I got a healthy number of @replies and direct messages I got. Within a 24 hour span I received 20 new followers.
There are about six pages of tweets that mention the event right now if you search.twitter Dream Team Poker. Currently there are about 30 people consistently twittering their action, including:
These people are doing a great job of growing their brand through twitter. It’s an opportunity for them to interact with fans/customers as a chance to increase their personal or professional brand. Consistently updating and engaging fans/consumers on twitter has the same results as meeting them in person. Followers make a true connection and have more of a “brand experience” beyond what they hear and read in the news.
Phil Hellmuth is doing some serious damage with mobile twitter updates. Always modest, he claims to be one of the first pro poker players to start twittering during poker tournaments. “A young internet billionaire convinced me it was a good way to go,” Hellmuth said. “I trust what he says so I started doing it. It’s worked out well so far.”
Brian Cooley, of Wicked Chops Poker, finds twittering during events very valuable. “It’s replacing the forums and the Web sites,” Cooley said. “You don’t need to go to a Web site to check out the action and get updates, you get better details on twitter. It definitely helps build brand images and get new readers.”
Mashable had a great blog post a while back about how to build your brand using twitter.
Uh-Oh they just made an announcement over the loud speaker encouraging people to twitter the event. Is someone spying on me?!
Back to the event…
2 Responses to “Twitter Invades Poker”
http://www.twtpoker.com is a great site for those that want to follow all the poker pros that tweet
By mike on May 17, 2009
charlie river just published an extensive list of poker pros and their twitter accounts:
http://www.pokerjunkie.com/poker-pros-on-twitter-the-list
By john on Oct 6, 2009