Yes, I refuse to call the Twitter trivia project, “Twivia.” I hope you appreciate that.
Despite what its Latin definition might lead you to believe, trivia is not trivial. Trivia questions have created game show empires, reinvented the American board game, and breathed new life back into Wednesday nights at your local bar. Now, you can make use of our cultural fascination with trivia to light a fire underneath your Twitter audience. Engage while you educate. Pontificate while you promote.
As with all of the projects in this book, the concept is simple, and there are many ways to approach the task. You will need to define a goal for your trivia project before you get started. Your goals will determine not only your questions, but how you run the game.
First, decide if you’d like to ask questions based on your niche, your company, or your products.
If you’re a content-producing company like a news organization, a book publisher, a magazine, or a blog, you will probably want to ask trivia questions based on your niche.
You could, of course, ask people questions about your products, but “What is the ISBN for “Rainwater Harvesting, Volume 1?” isn’t very compelling. However, “Which is the only US state to make rainwater harvesting illegal?” has more teeth to it. People will want to know. “Collecting rain? In a bucket? Illegal?!”
Likewise, if your topic is gardening, and your audience is devoted to and familiar with gardening, feel free to fire away any gardening trivia questions you have:
| @chelseagreen tweets: “Who pioneered four-season farming in the frozen northeast? #gardeningtrivia http://jmcd.me/y1GNpR” |
News organizations could ask questions about the week’s headlines, what happened on this date in history, or the odd breakfast habits of today’s political leaders. If you feel inclined to provide your audience with a hint, you could include a link to where the answer can be found on your site:
| @vprnet tweets: “What strange food does Vladimir Putin eat for breakfast? #topstorytrivia http://jmcd.me/y1ko79” |
If you’re a well-known manufacturer of consumer products—oh, let’s say…Apple—you could use your own products as your topic for trivia. (Author’s note: Apple isn’t on Twitter yet. I’ve made up a username.)
| @apple tweets: “What was the name of the first Apple tablet? Hint: Not iPad. http://apple.com/history #appletrivia” |
The key here is, of course, that people have to care. I’m sorry to say it, but if you’re not Apple and don’t have rockstar products, this is harder to do:
| @appliedlogistics tweets: “In what year did we introduce the JM-1020 to the Southeast Asian market? http://jmcd.me/wfEsq9 #snoozetrivia” |
This just won’t fly.
Finally, if you’ve got a long and storied company history, dig into your own record books to find some interesting trivia questions. You don’t have to be famous in this case—just interesting:
| @toyota tweets: “Who invented and holds the patent for those QR codes you’re seeing everywhere? #toyotatrivia http://jmcd.me/zLNb73” |
Author’s note: Toyota does.
Once you’ve decided how you’re going to approach this project, come up with a list of 5 or 10 questions (and links if you want to include them) to tweet out during the course of a day.
If anyone in your audience is able to answer all your questions correctly, reward that person with a prize or praise—as you see fit. Be sure, as always, to thank everybody for playing along.