#WakeUpWeightWatchers - Weight Watchers Twitter Take-Over - Are You In?
As many of you have seen, this past week Weight Watchers announced their plans for growth to reach 10 Million members and grow $2 Billion dollars in revenue. Along with this plan? Offering free memberships to teenagers (ages 13-17) this upcoming summer. Their reasoning is to ‘help the development of healthy habits at a critical life stage.’ This is why we’re saying #WakeUpWeightWatchers—it’s time to address the potential harm this could cause for teens.
We believe that we as professionals and advocates for eating disorders, body positivity, Health at Every Size & the anti-diet movement – we can and must shed a light on why this is so problematic!
BALANCE has planned a ‘TWITTER TAKEOVER’ campaign in which we plan to flood @WeightWatchers (and the general public!) with our thoughts on this dangerous plan. Using the hashtag #WakeUpWeightWatchers, We’d like to call on both Weight Watchers & Oprah to listen to us and to consider rescinding this policy before it is planned to take effect next summer. We appeal to both Oprah & Weight Watchers to engage in a dialogue with the professional community and with the families & loved ones suffering from eating disorders that care very much about this issue.
Raising Awareness Through #WakeUpWeightWatchers
BALANCE hopes that if enough of us participate in this campaign, our #WakeUpWeightWatchers hashtag can become a Trending Topic and bring awareness to this issue. This is not meant to be an attack on Weight Watchers but a prime opportunity for education on the damages and repercussions of dieting, especially for teens.
Details & Tips About #WakeUpWeightWatchers
- The main-time for our takeover: starting this Saturday February 10th at 12 PM eastern time & continuing thereafter (social media engagement can be up to 17% higher on weekends!)
- Utilize the hashtag #WakeUpWeightWatchers
- Make sure to tag @WeightWatchers
- Tag @Oprah in Tweets as well – as their spokesperson, she needs to hear our thoughts too!
- Plan multiple tweets regarding the topic to go out within the hour
- If you cannot Tweet live, you can schedule Tweets via free management tools like Buffer or Hootsuite
- Feel free to create graphics/quote cards to share during the chat
- Engage with other content being posted with the hashtag
- Encourage your followers to share their thoughts
What You Can Tweet About
- What you wish Weight Watchers would consider in promoting this plan
- What makes it so dangerous for teens
- Things parents/teens should know before considering this program
- Why Weight Watchers is actually offering a free plan since it is only to make more $$$
- What this could mean for teens susceptible to developing an eating disorder
- How this plan could effect the self-esteem and confidence of young girls/boys
- The many other things teens should be spending their summer break doing!
Join us at Twitter here, along with other eating disorder, Health at every Size, and body positive professionals and advocates this Saturday afternoon starting at 12pm ET for a Twitter Takeover to let @WeightWatchers know what we think of their free #Teen program! #WakeUpWeightWatchers
Please invite anyone else you’d think would be interested in participating! We hope to ‘see’ you on Twitter!
