6 tips you need to know about live-tweeting

Image credit: StartBloggingOnline.com.

Summit. Conference. Seminar. Workshop. Presentation. Our life, be it academic or business, is filled with events. There are numerous occasions where I love the topic of these public events but I just couldn’t go because of personal reasons.

Meanwhile, as communication coordinator at a research centre and co-founder of a bi-weekly public lecture series, I understand how eager I am to share the knowledge to a broader public, and also to attract interested communities both internal and external to the organizations I serve.

That’s where social media kicks in. According to the award-winning digital media scholar and online news pioneer, “Every day, 500 million messages are sent on Twitter and 800 million peoples share four billion stories, links, photographs and videos on Facebook.”

Thanks to these platforms, we can now live-tweet events. This not only helps to aggregate and archive events digitally, but also connect people all over the world remotely, receive live feedback from the audience, and grow an organization’s online network.

Social media also has a large impact on how businesses communicate effectively and in a timely manner with their customers. Compared with other forms of marketing, live-tweeting costs relatively less but brings in many distinctive benefits.

Live-tweeting for budget-conscious startups

This is especially true for budget-concious startups. If your company is launching a new product or presenting it at a public event, you would want as many people as possible to be aware of it. Live-tweeting lets you get in touch with potential customers, or investors and journalists interested in your product or service, even when they are not present at the scene.

Meanwhile, while marketing is targeted mainly at your audience, live-tweeting works both ways. With this online collective and interactive means of communication, you are taking notes while responding to both your company’s and your audience’s needs.

On the one hand, what could be better and more effective than answering questions and clearing doubts from your audience right after they are expressed to you? On the other hand, the online archive of tweets, not only by yourself but also by your audience, gives your company the ability to refer back to the event, and reflect on the whole “live marketing” process to see what is missing there.

While more and more event organizers realize the power of live-tweeting, few actually know how to do it well. Here are some tips and lessons I drew from my previous live-tweeting experience:

1. Set and be clear about your goal

What do you want to achieve from live-tweeting a particular event? Is it to reach out to a broader public and engage them in the conversation or is it to build a larger network for your organization?

While these two goals look alike and often intertwine, they actually require different live-tweeting strategies. In fact, it leads to a fundamental question of whether you should set up a new Twitter account – assuming that you are considering set up a new departmental Twitter account under its parent organization.

We tend to have the impression that the more followers we have, the better. But it is not always the case. If your goal is to have to-the-point and engaging conversation with interested audience on a particular topic, the size of your existing followers is actually not your main concern.

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