You can call me Alex, actually. Alexander isn’t even on my birth certificate; it was all a ploy for clicks! Let’s hope it worked.

Have you all heard of H&8th Night Market? If you’re in the Oklahoma City metro, I would assume that the answer is yes. For those tuning in from around the state/country/world at large: H&8th is the largest food truck gathering in the United States and it occurs on the last Friday of every month. The attendance this year has been at least 20,000 every month, with the record attendance falling between 35,000 and 40,000.

We reached out to the powers that be behind H&8th and asked about potentially taking over their Twitter account (@h_n_8th) for last week’s event to help promote Confluence and, frankly, to engage with what seems like a million followers. In reality, H&8th’s followers are approaching 10,000, but even that seems like a lot when your own followers are just approaching 500. Oh, by the way, have you followed @ConfluenceCon yet? I digress…

Luckily, our schoolboy charm (and money) was enough to get the H&8th representatives excited. Friday night was officially our time to shine, so the Confluence cronies met in Midtown oozing with creative contest ideas and enough Confluence Conference pint glasses to give away to roughly .13 percent of the crowd (40,000 people is a lot of people)!

We set up shop on the Ludivine patio facing the main stage where our friend (and Confluence Conference speaker) Ryan Drake was emceeing the event. Our first Twitter contest was simple: #cutestdog. Between the local musician’s sets, Drake would not only remind the crowd about our Twitter contest, but also pass out pint glasses and give the crowd an opportunity to sign-up for free tickets to the conference. In total, we ended up giving away 10 free tickets to the event – a $500 value.

While we received a handful of submissions for the #cutestdog contest, it seemed like most people were just sending pictures of their own dogs at home rather than of dogs at H&8th.

No worries; the night was young and we were still able to give out pint glasses to those that actually participated correctly. Our mentions and retweets were already rolling in, and we hadn’t even made it to our second contest of the night: #H8Crush. We’ll get to the ins and outs of #H8Crush in a minute, but first let’s take a look at H&8th’s (completely free) Twitter Analytics report from last Friday night.

As you can see in this graph, the H&8th Twitter account received 105 retweets  and 151 favorites in total Friday night (Aug 29). Would we have liked more? Sure; however, when you compare those numbers to the rest of the month, we accounted for roughly 35 percent of H&8th’s Twitter interaction for the month in just one night. That’s not bad. Now, let’s talk about #H8Crush, which was our best contest of the night. The concept was simple: find the most attractive person at H&8th, take a picture with him/her, and deem that person your H&8th Crush. However, because ampersands looks weird in hashtags, we decided to shorten it to #H8Crush (which is better for so many reasons). The winner received two free tickets to the Oklahoma Sooners vs. Kansas State Wildcats football game! Thanks to Keyhole (which is also completely free), we were able to see just how well the #H8Crush hashtag did: #H8Crush was most active at 8pm on Friday, which is when we started the competition. So, in roughly four hours, we had 48 posts with the #H8Crush hashtag that reached 30,519 people and made 202,717 impressions. Not bad for a competition that really only ran for two hours. We had a lot of great submissions, like this selfie from @jennyheinrichs: 

@Rayke @h_n_8th Done! #H8CRUSH Did I do that right? pic.twitter.com/E14IDAgXhs — Jenny Heinrichs (@jennyheinrichs) August 30, 2014

But ultimately, it was this submission from @syclthekid that took home the prize:

A big thanks goes out to all the people that interacted with us on Twitter, competed in the contests, and showed genuine interest in Confluence. Also, thanks to our friends at H&8th for letting us take control! You guys made our job super easy and fun.

If you haven’t been to an H&8th Night Market yet then stop whatever you’re working on RIGHT NOW and mark this date on your calendar: September 26. I’ll be there enjoying everything that H&8th has to offer:

The Food

The Music

And the view

For more pictures from our H&8th takeover, check out this Flickr album. If you haven’t signed up for Confluence yet, you still have time! Check out all the free goodies that you’ll get just by purchasing a ticket and showing up. Not to mention, we’ll be running a few Twitter contests similar to the ones we did for H&8th. Come be funny with me!