It is just over a month to World Plumbing Day, March 11, every year, everywhere, and the World Plumbing Council want all their members and and staff on board supporting this day around the World.

A great way to offer support for World Plumbing Day is to get involved with Twitter and see how many followers can be attracted for World Plumbing Day between now and March 11.

The challenge is to build WPD followers to over 1,000.

How can the challenge be met?

It will require a little time and effort, but if a majority of members and individuals become involved they should be able to attract a large number of followers and perhaps even exceed WPC’s target. The WPC Twitter name is: WPlumbingDay

1. WPC has asked all Members to put a link on their website home page and in any electronic newsletter that you might be sending out leading up to World Plumbing Day: https://twitter.com/#!/@WPlumbingDay
2. Any Members already on twitter could post regular “Tweets” about World Plumbing Day over the next few weeks.
3. Each member organization is asked to get their staff on board, and to let their own members know of the Challenge and to promote World Plumbing Day and WPC’s twitter feed.
4. Follow other plumbing related twitter feeds, some will automatically reciprocate creating more followers.

Develop a list of sample tweets.

1) Find an influential person (for example, someone from HGTV) who has strong industry ties and some followers on twitter and ask them to post a some tweets on World Plumbing Day and encourage their followers to follow World Plumbing Day.

2) Once the number of followers starts to build, develop some sort of twitter promotion to get followers talking about World Plumbing Day on twitter, so that their followers start to hear/see more about it.

3) As special events (large or small) start happening around the world, they should all be mentioned on twitter. Sometimes unique things will help generate followers and conversation faster – as long as they are not inappropriate.

Tips for posting on twitter:

1) Tweets are limited to 140 characters, which includes spaces and punctuation, so you have to be brief.

2) You can include links to web sites, but it’s a good idea to keep the link short (eg.,through www.tinyurl.com <http://www.tinyurl.com > or other sites).

3) If posting a tweet about World Plumbing Day on another twitter feed, please include: @WPlumbingDay

4) This will allow readers to “Click” on the twitter name and go directly to the World Plumbing Day twitter page. And when there is room, consider also including www.worldplumbingday.org <http://www.worldplumbingday.org >

Hashtags are another way to build traffic.

1) People will often search twitter using these tools. For example, if you want to see recent tweets about ‘plumbing’ then type in #plumbing in the search box at the top. Similarly to have tweets about plumbing found by people interested in the subject, include #plumbing in the tweet. If you are using the word plumbing in the body of the tweet: i.e. Help celebrate World Plumbing Day… then just put the “#” before the world plumbing. Like this: Help celebrate World #Plumbing Day. If the word plumbing is not in the body of the tweet, then at the end of the tweet, add: #plumbing @WPlumbingDay. You might also want to add #plumber or other hashtags.

2) Last year, some folks coined the phrase “Hug a Plumber”. We could, for example, encourage people to post: Hug a #plumber on World Plumbing Day, March 11th @WPlumbingDay www.worldplumbingday.org <http://www.worldplumbingday.org >

A special thanks to Elizabeth McCullough, general manager, Tradeshows at the Canadian Institute of Plumbing and Heating for her assistance and advice in putting the Challenge together.

Here’s the WPC and the wider plumbing community being able to report back after March 11 that the target has been exceeded exceeded our target.