Essential Tips for Live-Tweeting your Event
We have put together our top tips for live-tweeting an event, to help you to embrace this fast-paced and exciting area of social media.
Before
Ideally you should assign a person, or even a team, to take on the responsibility of live-tweeting. Of course, speakers and attendees will probably be tweeting throughout the day too, but as a company you should have a dedicated tweeter who can manage your corporate account for the duration.
Knowing which hashtags to use is vital. For big events there is often a designated hashtag, but you may also want to use a company-specific hashtag alongside it. This ensures that those interested in the event, whether present or not, can follow the latest developments. Check that your hashtag is not already in use and that it is short and to the point. Promote your hashtags ahead of the event so everyone knows how to join in the conversation.
There will be certain tweets, or at least templates, that you can prepare and schedule ahead of time. These can be as simple as announcing the next speaker and the topic of their presentation. If you are worried about scheduling then draft some tweets and save them in a note or text document to copy and paste when needed.
Prepare the main links for your event ahead of time, and shorten them so they do not use up a lot of your tweet characters. Again, save these in a notepad to copy and paste as needed. You should also have a list of the Twitter handles for all your speakers and key guests.
The final thing you need to do ahead of time is remember to pack your chargers for your phone/laptop/tablet and confirm the WiFi connection at the venue.
During
Use the hashtags, plus appropriate links and mentions of those involved, in every applicable tweet. Shorten the tweet rather than miss out the hashtag – there is no point saying something if no one will find it!
You should not just focus on outing out your own tweets but also spend time interacting with other tweeters. This is where it can be useful to have several people who are tweeting – just ensure each person knows which part of the job they are responsible for. For example, one person could manage the scheduled tweets and speaker announcements, one could tweet key highlights from speeches and another could handle the interactions.
Don’t forget to use images and GIFs to make your tweets stand out and help add to the excitement and give a sense of atmosphere for those who are not present.
After
Do not stop tweeting and interacting as soon as the event comes to a close – continue the conversations for as long as is practical and appropriate to ensure you build relationships.
Take some time to go through the event hashtag and retweet and respond to other company and individual tweets.
And finally, when back in the office with time to breathe, assess how your live-tweeting went, what could be done better and what you have learnt from the experience.