A number of high-profile figures, including Stephen Fry and Simon Cowell, decided to join a Twitter campaign to find missing kids. They reached out to their 22m followers in support of the charity Missing People on May 25, the International Missing Children’s Day.

The charity Missing People tweets a different appeal for a missing kid every half an hour for one day. The group also encourages its followers to retweet. That’s what Simon Cowell did, saying in the microblog: “It’s that time of year again – missingpeople’s #TheBigTweet. Hopefully we can reunite more missing children with their families this year.”

According to estimations of Missing People, as many as 140,000 children go missing in the United Kingdom every year, and its patron Stephen Fry urged Twitter users to help “reunite families going through the worst experience imaginable”. Fry approached his audience to say that it’s a very simple concept and everyone should be involved. The matter is that by simply retweeting the appeals, everyone can help extend the platform that might bring missing children home. Making the details of missing children available via social media is very simple, yet very effective way to give the appeals as much coverage as possible.

He brings an example of the last year campaign, where 58,000 retweets were made in one day and helped find 2 missing children. Indeed, it turns out that every pair of eyes and ears matters to the search. Any user may become that someone who recognizes a child’s face seen on Twitter passing them somewhere.

The charity Missing People is usually using the Twitter handle missingpeople and the hashtag TheBigTweet in its tweets.