9 Steps To Use Twitter For Marketing And Engaging Others About Your Event

A Twitter Conference Primer: Part 2 – Marketing And Engagement

Published on Sep 17, 2010 by Jeff Hurt in Social Media

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Image by joelaz.

You’ve decided to jump into the world of social technologies and use Twitter for your event.

You’ve done the first six steps to prepare to use Twitter for your event.

1. Ensure wireless Internet connections onsite.

2. Create a hashtag for your event.

3. Register your event hashtag.

4. Market and promote your hashtag.

5. Use same hashtag for Flickr.

6. Included participants’ Twitter name on their name badges.

So what’s next?

Now it’s time to think seriously about your Twitter engagement and marketing goals.

9 Steps To Use Twitter For Marketing And Engaging Others About Your Event

1. Create a Twitter Engagement Marketing Plan

How do you want to use Twitter for your event? Twitter is more than just a broadcast marketing tool. If you are using it to broadcast your own stuff more than 25% of the time, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Your conference stakeholders expect you to use it in a variety of ways. Consider the five Cs of engagement when using Twitter:

• Co-Creation- how can your attendees help you co-create content, experiences and programming?
• Collaboration – how can your participants collaborate with you, your exhibitors and speakers for a more engaging experience?
• Communication – what information about the conference can you easily share via Twitter? You’ll want to use URL shorteners to share long html addresses.
• Connections – how can you help likeminded conference participants connect with each other?
• Content – what content (announcements, articles, blog posts, photos, slidedecks, webinars, videos, etc.) can you share?

2. Create and train a HERO Team

Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler’s book Empowered talks about creating HEROs for your organization. HEROs are highly empowered and resourceful operatives. Your HEROs can be a combination of volunteers and staff. You’ll want to train your conference HERO team on how to listen, follow and respond to tweets with the hashtag before, during and after the event.

This is where many meeting professionals drop the ball. They follow the hashtag stream before and after the event but forget about onsite. It’s imperative that you empower your HERO team and provide great service to your participants. Think of your onsite hashtag listening as a personal concierge for your participants. You’ll want to respond to real time feedback immediately when you can and not after the event.

3. Create a short Twitter “how to” video explaining the use of Twitter for your event.

Post these on your conference YouTube page.

http://jeffhurtblog.com/2010/09/17/twitter-conference-primer-part-2-marketing-engagement/