Music fest uses prizes to boost Twitter following

Chicago’s Ravinia aggregates positive tweets to spread good cheer and expand its audience

How do you get people to tweet about you? Do you wait by the Twitter search screen, pressing refresh on your company name every minute? Do you organize endless promotions that ask for retweets to win a prize? Or do you quietly start a best-of-tweets program and see what happens?

Ravinia Festival, a music venue outside Chicago, had about 200 followers, at the beginning of the summer music season in June. Now, nearing its end, it has more than 1,100 followers. It tweets about upcoming shows, it tweets about parking availability (by popular demand), and each week it goes through the Twitter search terms for Ravinia and picks 10 related tweets to publish on its blog, “This Week in Tweets.”