Dark Lord Golden Ticket - courtesy of drooo - Creative Commons

(Munster, IN) – Twitter and Facebook aren’t for everyone. They provide two great ways to keep up with news from breweries but some are understandably adverse to new technologies. Twitter especially has its detractors, as evidenced by some of the comments that followed Three Floyds Brewing‘s announcement that it would notify people of Dark Lord bottle ticket sales via Twitter.

There are still skeptics that ask, “Why would anyone care what I had for lunch?” Just realize that you can still “lurk” on Twitter just like you can on any old-fashioned message board. You can subscribe to my updates (@beersage / @beerpulse) and those of hundreds of breweries without ever posting a single message. The fact is that there is no service that is faster for breaking news, beer-related or in general.

One of those breaking news items will be Three Floyds Brewing’s announcement that Golden Tickets for Dark Lord bottles will go on sale this Wednesday. From what I recall last year, they went on sale at the wee hours in the morning and still only lasted a few hours. How long will they last this year? An hour or two, if that? Especially with a lucrative secondary market that arose in eBay- 50 postings for Golden Tickets last year . . .

For the record, according to Three Floyds, “The twitter announcement will coincide with an announcement on this site, beeradvocate.com and ratebeer.com at almost the same time.” Still, Twitter provides an advantage that these others sites do not and that is immediate text message alerts for new postings. So if they put the tickets on sale in the wee hours of the morning again and if you’ve set your phone to go off with a text message alert from the Three Floyds account, you will be right on top of it. Here is how to set that up.

1) Go to the Twitter home page and sign up for a free account.

2) Once logged in, click on “settings” in the upper right.

3) In the horizontal menu on the next page, click “Mobile.”

4) Follow the instructions to turn on device updates.

5) Go to the Three Floyds Twitter account and click “Follow” underneath the avatar. You will see the button change to say, “Following.” Then click on the tiny mobile phone icon next to it to turn on device updates for that account. You will now get Three Floyds updates sent immediately to your phone. To undo at any time, just click that mobile phone icon again.

Disclaimer: standard text messaging rates apply! Though I’m pretty sure that you will not hesitate to pay 30 cents for your chance at some Dark Lord . . .

6) For good measure, you can also repeat step 5 for the Three Floyds Pub account but I’m nearly certain that they will be tweeting the announcement from their main account first. There’s also a mysterious Dark Lord Day account but I have no idea whether this is the brewery’s account or started by a random person.

And there you have it. Good luck getting your tickets and give Twitter a shot!

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