Here are seven golden rules to keep in mind as you prepare to tweet your next tech event:
1) Establish a hashtag, and start using it before the event in all Twitter communications. Without doing this, you may find yourself in a “hashtag war” where your company suggests one but users use another. This is not a disaster. But it can be sloppy. One reason users will pick a different hashtag: yours is too long. Because hashtags will be appended to all related tweets, they should be short, to take up as little room as possible. Consider changing #mycompanyevent to #mce. You lose a little in obvious branding but gain a lot in Twitter usefulness. Searching for this hashtag at any point gives readers a quick summary of all tweets related to your event.
2) You’ll tweet a little bit about your event leading up to the day, and then you’ll turn on the fire hose of tweets as the event unfolds, in real-time. If you’re worried about how the big change in the number of tweets coming from your account will be received, don’t be. In general, in Twitter, more information is welcomed, not criticized. By all means, in the days leading up to the event, give your followers some warnings: “Event coming up, we’re trying something different, live-tweeting it.”
3) Make sure your tweets are short enough to be easily retweeted. 140 characters MINUS “RT @yourcompany” means that others reading your tweets can retweet them without any editing. At a live event, this is a major advantage.
4) Not all issues are technology related. Don’t forget politics. Live tweeting panels, even though it’s a public forum, requires taking into account participants’ opinions as well, and can be a bit tricky. If you have someone running the Twitter feed who can take political considerations into account real-time, you’ll be better off. Too sharp of comments and there are potential participant issues. Too bland and your Twitter feed is useless. Most likely, other Twitter feeds will fill in with sharper criticism.
5) In one case, Page One PR’s client was very open source centric, so giving a nod to Identi.ca, built on open source software, was important. All tweets were initiated through Identi.ca. You can easily configure Identi.ca to automatically post to Twitter. All tweets are then signed “half a minute ago from Identica,” marking you as an open source supporter. (As you should be!)
6) Timing is of the essence. With other people enthusiastically tweeting, five minutes late looks really late. Preparing informative tweets ahead of time helps. In a separate document, if you know, for instance, 3-4 panels that the company will be tweeting about, line up 3-4 tweets that announce “XYZ panel with John and Jane Doe, just getting started…” Interspersing prepared tweets with live ones will help significantly with your real-time workload. Bonus rule for the expert Tweeters to consider:
7) How to work with panels. Soliciting questions for a panel may feel like a good idea — real democracy! — but there are several important things to consider. Are you confident you can get enough questions live? If not, soliciting questions ahead of time is smart. How do you transmit them up to the podium? IMing them is possible, but whoever is receiving them needs to both scan and summarize real-time. They can not be actively participating in the panel. Summarizing and reporting the answers? Not possible with one person running the Twitter feed. Ideally, you need two people to properly handle: one who is monitoring the Twitter feed, one who is listening to the panel and summarizing and condensing answers into tweets. (Not easy!) Tweeting back answers? Again, not possible with one person.
Tags: best practices, events, hashtag, live-tweeting, panels, retweet, tech events, Twitter
RT
Great post Jesse and very timely!
[...] are getting great value out of using Twitter at events. There are even some really in-depth best practices emerging around the use of Twitter leading up to and during events. If events are a meaningful part of your marketing mix, there are lots of creative ways that you [...]
Thank you, Jesse san, for a good rule of thumb in tweeting!
-Jamie, A Twitter Beginner
Jesse- I commented on this story sometime last week. I think that when you guys transitioned to the new site (looks great, btw) somehow my comment died in limbo. It’s probably sitting on some Apache server somewhere
Anyway, it blows my mind how wrong I was about Twitter’s usefulness to tech marketing. Not that I’m not often wrong, but just *how* wrong I was.
I was pretty oblivious to the use of hash tags and importance thereof – and this post in general was quite useful to thinking about Twitter in the context of tech events. I personally view events as one an area of tech marketing that can be *incredibly* lucrative, but is more often than not incredibly inefficient. I have seen so many tech companies waste countless dollars and time at events that do not pan out in their favor (either in terms of publicity, or leads generated, or whatever the goal was while there).
Putting Twitter to use to connect with the audiences that matter at the event – that seems incredibly worthwhile. Events are expensive! From booth space to attendee passes to just the time of being out of the office and present – when companies go to an event it is a major investment. It’s really cool that tech PR firms can now do this much to support their clients there and help connect the dots between the client and the various even attendee relationships that might not otherwise have been capitalized on. Looking forward to reading more about this and continuing to get Twitter education through my thick skull.
Great advice and tactics for using twitter to be of maximum benefit for live tech events. It can be hard to get used to shortening down information into useful and effective bites for Twitter. Micro blogging certainly has us all thinking about how we can best say what we need to in a lot less words. Sometimes this is easy and it is best not to over complicate it by thinking too hard. Because Twitter can be used to make immediate announcements if on thing doesn’t work you can easily try another to see if that is speaking to your audience any better. At least this is a free way to test out your target market and discover their needs.
[...] Originally published in the on April 22, 2009 [...]
One of the most famous social networking site is twittter. Thanks for this good tips.