What are the best practices for live tweeting at my event?

Live tweeting is kind of like note-taking, only it’s online, collective, and interactive. Twitter plays a central role in attendee engagement, as participants will be chattering about your event as it’s happening. Your goal for live tweeting an event includes increasing engagement and visibility throughout the event, enhancing existing relationships with your connections, keeping remote followers engaged in the conversation and inspiring people to attend next year’s event. 71% of millennials think that tweeting about an event as they’re experiencing it makes it more fun. (click to tweet) Follow these tips and warm up your thumbs—you’re going to be running the show on Twitter in no time!

Plan ahead

Knowing the schedule of sessions in advance is necessary to help with planning. Is coverage needed for concurrent sessions? If so, assign different accounts – referred to as Tweet Ambassadors – to handle other sessions. Doing some research on speakers, sponsors, and partners to better understand their subject matter or relevant hashtags can make your live-tweet session that much more effective. Creating a public list of these accounts on Twitter is a great way both for you and your followers to track them. Finally, use a site like Canva to create visual templates that you can fill in and share throughout the event. Visual content is 40x more likely to be shared on social networks.

Pre-schedule your tweets

When you have generic informational messages to share, save yourself time by scheduling these messages in advance using a free tool (Hootsuite and Buffer being ones we like). Introduce speakers, create hype about sessions as they are about to start, and ask questions that promote conversations. Make sure to include your event hashtag(s) in every tweet you send out.

Make your content shareable

Live-tweeting is not intended to be a verbatim transcription of an entire session. Rather, it’s more of an exercise in “interactive note-taking”. Share highlights, jokes, important statistics and the like. Be sure to grab a front-row seat or privileged access to the action at your event. Think about what might be favourited, retweeted and quoted by followers when deciding what to tweet. Don’t forget that not all content needs to come from you. Retweet others to fill in gaps or when tweets are particularly well written.

Engage with attendees

Monitor the chatter involving your hashtag. Answer any questions, and retweet or engage with positive comments. When faced with negative posts, be apologetic and try to continue the conversation privately. Ask questions to get participants talking and gain insight on what you might be able to improve for next time! Finally, check in on the unofficial hashtags that may be in use despite your best efforts.

Repurpose your content

What’s great about a successful live-tweeting campaign is the amount of high-quality user-generated content created by participants about their own experience during your event. Repurpose this content in your future event marketing material to drive attendance.

Top tweets from our community

This Week in Realtime Media: How Live-Tweeting is Carrying the #NBA Playoff Conversation https://t.co/Dvolsn3Z93 @gabriellehughes

— Convince & Convert (@convince) May 17, 2016

Hot Tips for Live Tweeting Your Event by @projectmaven https://t.co/VTgMyx4tcr pic.twitter.com/R6E9wH6wrb

— techsytalk (@techsytalk) February 29, 2016

“Ten Simple Rules of Live Tweeting at Scientific Conferences” by @PLOS https://t.co/sdVkeLCfdC #eventprof

— Streamline Data (@StreamlineData) June 3, 2016

Article by Justin Mulfati

Justin is passionate about bridging the gap between art and business, and is constantly on the lookout for great event marketing content to share with the sensov/ community.