I am usually fairly mild mannered and it takes a bit more to get me into a frenzy, but I have to say, it was an absolute buzz to get involved in the #UKTVNeedsOutlander twitter campaign on Thursday night !

I’m still learning about social media and getting the Outlander Tours social presence set up, so it was a great opportunity to learn from more experienced twitter hacks in the run up to the campaign.  Now I have to admit that I wasn’t as organised as I would have hoped, but I had 1 hour after coming in from work to make dinner, have a shower, sort out scheduled tweets and prepare for an interview as Scottish tour director for a US based travel company.  Thankfully the interview seemed to go well and I was straight back into twitter to get involved in the campaign within half an hour.

The organisation and set up by the Outlandish UK team and Lisa Branford was first class  – sample tweets, addresses for our “targets”, and as I found out later (hangs head in shame) brilliant photos to add to our tweets (note to self, scroll down the page a bit more in future !).

I don’t think my fingers have ever worked so fast over the keyboard and my brain was having a ball trying to come up with slogans, witty comments, and reasons for the UK networks to announce that they had taken Outlander.  About half way through there was a message on Facebook and Twitter to say that retweets didn’t count, but you could “quote” others.  I attacked the task with renewed vigour !  I was so impressed by what people were posting and there is no doubt of the worldwide passion for this.

In the end there were about 5000 tweets in the first hour, and after some encouragement from Sam, over 7000 in the second hour.  It was great that there was so much twitter love from Outlander fans across the world and it did trend briefly in the States, though we didn’t quite make it in the UK (thanks Lisa and Angela Sasso for the info).

I am proud to say that I was a part of the campaign and will continue to get involved until UK has an announcement.

Next stop, the BAFTA Scotland screening of the first two episodes in Glasgow on 18th August – if there are any TV Execs there, I will be having a word on behalf of all UK Outlander fans !