6 Steps To Prepare To Use Twitter For Your Event

A Twitter Conference Primer: Part 1 – Preparing For The Event

Published on Sep 16, 2010 by Jeff Hurt in Social Media

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Image by Rosaura Ochoa

It’s like the sound of fingernails scraping on a chalkboard. It’s unpleasant. And annoying.

It similar to a primate’s warning cry striking fear in the tribe that a predator is near. Few of us can avoid cringing in agony when we hear that sound. We respond with adverse reactions.

That’s exactly how I feel when I hear meeting professionals say the following sentence:

“My attendees are not using Twitter or social media so I don’t need to be concerned about it.”

A-r-g-h-h-h! Just hold me down and scrape rocks on my teeth.

When I respond to that question with current data that illustrates the opposite, these meeting professionals look at me and say, “Do you really believe that data? Come on. I know my attendees better than that data. They are not using social media at my event.”

How Many Of Your Conference Participants Have Smartphones?

How many of your attendees carry a smartphone with them? I suspect you would say 90%-95% do.

And guess what, they are using their smartphone to access the Internet, update their social networks and talk about your event!

So are you even listening and observing if they are talking about your event? Have you created a common hashtag for your event so that you can see online conference conversations?

Here are six steps to help you use Twitter when preparing for your event.

6 Steps To Prepare To Use Twitter For Your Event

1. Provide wireless Internet connections

Before you consider using Twitter or other social media at your event, ensure that your attendees have free wifi access when onsite. Did you include wireless internet access as part of your venue negotiations? If not, how’s the cell phone reception in the venue? Tell your venue that they have a vested interest in being part of the online conversations.

2. Create a hashtag for your event.

Hashtags are the pound sign followed by a short abbreviation. They help add context, metadata and tags to your tweets. Hashtags also help users filter the Twitter noise and follow a specific stream of information.

Your job is to pick a short conference hashtag. Use as few characters as possible because Twitter limits tweets to 140 characters.

ASAE’s 2010 Annual Meeting used #asae10 as their hashtag. PNW Industry Summit used #industrysummit.

Also search Twitter to ensure that another group is not using the same hashtag.

http://jeffhurtblog.com/2010/09/16/twitter-conference-primer-part-1-preparing-for-event/