Almost two years ago, I sat at a round table to listen to world leaders at the G20 Youth Entrepreneurship Conference in Toronto. Why was I there? In short, I got my spot at the table after writing the ‘best answer’ to their contest question “How does entrepreneurship affect our world?”. The prize of this contest was to live-tweet and blog throughout the conference. Since then, I’ve seen the evolution of Twitter and how many more event organizers have integrated live-tweeting to increase reach and participation. There are three areas I believe make up a successful event with Twitter and it starts with planning ahead.
Having all the essentials that people need to live-tweet at an event is utmost important. If your room has a poor internet connection, how do you think your attendees will feel after being told they should tweet and follow conversations on Twitter? They probably won’t be very happy. Let’s get the equipment and location requirements down tight so technical difficulties are a non-issue on the big day.
A few questions to ask yourself in the planning stage:
These are just a few questions to ask before promoting live-tweeting at events. Once all these have been handled, then it is a matter of ensuring your employees know their roles and responsibilities with marketing the event.
That’s right. Before you ask your participants to tweet at your event, it is important that they know how to do it properly. This is important for both parties; employees and external attendees. Twitter has a great guide on Live-Tweeting Best Practices on their homepage, but I want to take a few points further to bring some additional thoughts into the event planning process.
When the initial planning stages are complete, it is time to strategize what needs to be done to get the word out there about following the event on Twitter. Here are some things to think about:
TIP on choosing the right #hashtag: Depending on whether the event will continue year after year, it is best to use a short and generic word that is memorable. For example, the Online Marketing Summit uses #OMS12 as their hashtag. While this is a good hashtag, if #OMS was not used for anything else, #OMS is recommended over one that has a year appended to the end of it. This allows past participants and followers to keep their saved search for that conference year over year.
At the end of the day, it is important that we measure the impact and evaluate what went well and what didn’t. There are a number of tools that can do this for you, but here are the ones that think work fairly well:
One of the enjoyable aspects with live-tweeting is being able to follow an event in real-time, from anywhere in the world. So, don’t think that the people on your attendees list are the only eyeballs on you; there are hundreds, if not thousands of others who are tuning into the discussions online.
While we’ve summarized a lot you could use in your events, this is not a complete list if you have a creative mind. How have you planned for a live-tweeting at events? What has worked and what hasn’t? Please share your ideas and comments below!
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