Your Guide to participating in the "Changing Diapers Twitter Party."

Join us for the Twitter Party of the year! To celebrate the launching of her new book, Changing Diapers, author and cloth diapering guru, Kelly Wels is holding a huge Twitter party on Tuesday, June 7th, 2011 at 9PM eastern time!  Lots of people have been asking questions about all of the details. Many of you are unfamiliar with Twitter Parties, so hopefully, this index/faq blog will help with that. If you have any further questions, please leave them in the comments and we will try to help you!

 

What is a Twitter Party?

You know, there’s no shame in not knowing what the crap a Twitter Party is. Maybe you chose Facebook for social networking. Maybe you’re unfamiliar with social networking all together. Social networking is moving at such high speeds, it feels really easy to drown in the information pool. So, I took the plunge for you. A Twitter Party is what happens when a bunch of people are deliberately tweeting about the same topic at the same time. A Twitter Party is explained quite well, especially pertaining to this particular Twitter Party in this blog.

 

I don’t have a Twitter account and I don’t want to use Twitter.

OK, well, anyway, it takes less than five minutes to sign up for Twitter, even when a baby is climbing on your head. I know this from experience. This Twitter Party alone will make having a Twitter account worth it. You don’t have to tweet to the world or join in on the snippet-socialization that happens on Twitter every day. You can just reserve your twitter account for the really cool events that you won’t want to miss. Then you can ignore your Twitter account the rest of the year.

 

How to I follow someone on Twitter?

Well, first, you so a search. You can search a number of ways. For example, you can search for “Kelly Wels” in the search bar. It will give you the option (via tabs on the left near the top) that say: Tweets, Tweets with Links, and People. You can search any of these tabs to try to find either her profile or tweets about her. If you see someone’s username underlined anywhere when you scroll over a tweet, you can click on that link and it will take you to their profile. There, you will see a “Follow” button, with a green plus sign beside it. Click on that to follow it.

 

Who should I go follow now to prepare for the Changing Diapers Twitter Party?

The main hosts that you will want to follow are: @KellyWels, @TheEcoChic, @EcoChicParties. From there, there are numerous sponsors already that you will probably want to start following now. These sponsors are all companies that have chosen to not only sponsor the party, but also donate amazing door prizes for all of you to win. So, you will also want to follow: @everythingbirth, @rockingreensoap, @peaweebaby, @sloomb, @bummis, @happyheinys, @diaper_junction, @thewillowstore, @diapershops, @knickernappies, @Eucalan.

Wait, did you say door prizes?

Oh yes, besides being able to get the inside scoop on Kelly Wels’ new book and mingle with the big players in the cloth diapering world, you will also be in the running for some amazing door prizes. Kelly Wels gets into all the specifics of it in this blog. The main thing to know, if you are interested in door prizes is you have to register. I’ve done it already and it took less than 30 seconds. You can register at the bottom-ish of this blog. You won’t be eligible to win anything if you don’t register. You also won’t be eligible to win anything if you don’t actually participate in the tweeting. So, practice some tweets ahead of time and play around with hashtags to practice.

 

What is the hashtag that I should use in my tweets for this particular Twitter party?

#changingdiapers

 

Wait a minute, what are hashtags?

A writer for The New Yorker explains hashtags quite well in this blog. This is a hashtag: #. That’s right, the number sign. The pound sign. When you put that in front of a word or group of words on twitter, it’s called a hashtag. Basically though, if you use a hashtag (or put a #beforeagroupofwords) then that group of words (or  #thatword) is more likely to show up in a search of tweets. So essentially, you’re just making sure your tweet gets noticed and grouped with other tweets. That’s what makes up a Twitter Party essentially, like I mentioned above… a group of people, deliberately tweeting about the same thing at the same time.

 

Where can I get more information about the Changing Diapers Twitter Party?

You can get almost all the information you need about the details of the Changing Diapers Twitter Party by reading this blog.