Event organizers: Nine tips for live tweeting your conferences and other events

Ellen Seebold | Feb 02, 2011

Comments 13

(Ten is so clichéd, and I only had 9 anyway)

Live tweeting your conference as the host has come a long way. It’s become standard practice now and many entities (companies, non-profits, media) are doing it successfully – engaging conference participants, broadcasting the conference beyond its venue and greatly multiplying reach, extending the brand of the conference and its hosting organization, and subsequently creating buzz and increasing followers.

Having been to many conferences, meetings, trade shows, conventions and events where live tweeting was done well (and sometimes not so well), I will share nine reminders for conference hosts and organizers:

1: Have a pre-event strategy in place to use Twitter to build your audience beforehand, to encourage registrations and increase ticket sales. Twitter is a great lead generator!

2: When it’s your brand or company hosting the event or conference, YOU should be the live tweet moderator. You need to monitor the conversation, retweet, acknowledge others, thank, participate!

3: Don’t depend on attendees to tweet your main concepts and important subjects. It’s your conference and your chance to highlight what’s important to your audience and brand.

4: Live tweet from your OWN brand’s Twitter account. You want the buzz to come back to you – creating more attention and followers. There are exceptions to this rule, but if you must have a separate conference account, be sure to cross-promote your brand. You don’t want to lose alll that momentum and attention once the conference is over. Tweeting live from YOUR event from YOUR main account increases your brand equity!

5: If you absolutely have no one on staff who can be dedicated to day-of conference tweeting from your organization’s main page, it’s ok to hire ghost tweeters with in-depth knowledge of your conference’s theme, content, purpose and audience, and related products and services. But he/she should still tweet under your account’s name.

6: Frequency of your tweets during the conference? This depends on the size of the event and the amount of content but I recommend 3-6 per hour, not including retweets and @ replies.

7: Promotion: Create a hashtag (#) for the event and put this on all your materials prior. Use it while tweeting, post it live on-site at your venue, and encourage everyone to use it.

8: Live tweeting isn’t just broadcast media – you are hosting a sideline conversation in conjunction with your conference – providing additional content and commentary that enriches the experience for all.

9. Follow up! Be sure to follow-back the new followers you gain during the conference – and thank and acknowledge everyone who tweeted your content.

Filed Under: Conference & Event Planning • Social Media

About the Author:

http://WebSavvyPR.com CathyWebSavvyPR

Ellen,

Great tips here, I would just add a couple more tips. PLEASE make it easy on audience members who are live tweeting. If the speaker or panel members are on twitter, please verbally tell people their twitter @usernames. You can use Twitter’s list feature to create an a.m. and p.m. speakers list. Then tweet it out several times from the host account using the conference hashtag. Also you can have your conference team tweet a list of each topic & speakers @names as they start (this handles those hard to spell or funky twitter names). This is a big help & helps give your speakers proper credit for their work. Also, it makes the conference organizers look clued in & those lists will get retweeted.

You can also hire people to attend the event & live tweet from their own Twitter account (some will do it for a free conference ticket, others for an additional fee). Just be sure that their twitter account and interests of their followers matches the theme of the conference, and be sure they’ve done it before, or give them some guidance. I have live tweeted several in-person events and several online webinars.

I know that some conference speakers find the live tweeting distracting or wonder if anyone is paying attention – but to me it is just another form of taking notes – just kinda publicly. One benefit of live tweeting you may not see until the next year, but I know of at least one conference that grew their attendance the second year mainly because of the live tweeting of the 1st year’s event (discovered when they asked – how did you hear about this event).

OK – one last tip before the event set up the conference at WTHashtag.com – then after the conference – tweet out a transcript of the tweets from each day – I’m not sure how many people read them, but transcripts often get a lot of retweets. What The Hashtag also shows who your top tweeters are, and lets you know who you might like to invite back next year, or who didn’t do such a good job.
http://WebSavvyPR.com CathyWebSavvyPR

Ellen,

Great tips here, I would just add a couple more tips. PLEASE make it easy on audience members who are live tweeting. If the speaker or panel members are on twitter, please verbally tell people their twitter @usernames. You can use Twitter’s list feature to create an a.m. and p.m. speakers list. Then tweet it out several times from the host account using the conference hashtag. Also you can have your conference team tweet a list of each topic & speakers @names as they start (this handles those hard to spell or funky twitter names). This is a big help & helps give your speakers proper credit for their work. Also, it makes the conference organizers look clued in & those lists will get retweeted.

You can also hire people to attend the event & live tweet from their own Twitter account (some will do it for a free conference ticket, others for an additional fee). Just be sure that their twitter account and interests of their followers matches the theme of the conference, and be sure they’ve done it before, or give them some guidance. I have live tweeted several in-person events and several online webinars.

I know that some conference speakers find the live tweeting distracting or wonder if anyone is paying attention – but to me it is just another form of taking notes – just kinda publicly. One benefit of live tweeting you may not see until the next year, but I know of at least one conference that grew their attendance the second year mainly because of the live tweeting of the 1st year’s event (discovered when they asked – how did you hear about this event).

OK – one last tip before the event set up the conference at WTHashtag.com – then after the conference – tweet out a transcript of the tweets from each day – I’m not sure how many people read them, but transcripts often get a lot of retweets. What The Hashtag also shows who your top tweeters are, and lets you know who you might like to invite back next year, or who didn’t do such a good job.
Eseebold

great additions Cathy – thank you!
Eseebold

great additions Cathy – thank you!
http://www.idoinspire.com Jody Urquhart

Awesome post. Trouble is as a speaker at a conference- when people are tweeting and on their devices (when you are speaking) it is very distracting. I don’t think an audience member gets as much out of it when they are distracted.
I have seen people who are texting etc turn to the person next to them to ask them what was just said.
http://www.idoinspire.com Jody Urquhart

Awesome post. Trouble is as a speaker at a conference- when people are tweeting and on their devices (when you are speaking) it is very distracting. I don’t think an audience member gets as much out of it when they are distracted.
I have seen people who are texting etc turn to the person next to them to ask them what was just said.
http://twitter.com/MargaretMolloy Margaret Molloy

Ellen: Great post and comments.
@MargaretMolloy
http://twitter.com/MargaretMolloy Margaret Molloy

Ellen: Great post and comments.
@MargaretMolloy
http://kenyaeventshub.com Noella

Quite informative, thank you for this.
http://kenyaeventshub.com Noella

Quite informative, thank you for this.
http://kenyaeventshub.com Noella

Quite informative, thank you for this on using tweeter.
http://kenyaeventshub.com Noella

Quite informative, thank you for this on using tweeter.
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