Companies spend thousands of dollars to attend or sponsor conferences, and one of the best ways to recoup those costs is by dominating social media channels – particularly the “Twittersphere” – during the show. Twitter should be your highest-priority channel for a number of reasons, including:
- Event hashtags: Almost every conference or event that you attend will have a custom hashtag. This allows like-minded audiences and attendees to converse on the subject prior to, during and after the event.
- Real-time engagement: Twitter has the fastest content stream of all major social media platforms, which lets you engage with a larger amount of content in a shorter amount of time.
- Opportunity: With all of the tagging capabilities on Twitter, you’re able to make posts visible to a much larger audience than through other social media platforms. As a result, you can “virtually” meet new prospects and influencers with ease.
So here are some tips on how to out-tweet your competitors during your next conference:
Tip #1: Have an understanding of the conference tone
Before you attend a conference, I recommend scrolling back through the event handle’s Twitter history and making yourself familiar with its voice and tone. Is the tone serious? Is it casual? Is it fun and exciting? After determining what kind of tone that conference administrators have taken, you should look to mirror that voice in the tweets you share before and during the show.
Tip #2: Use visuals or other forms of multimedia content in ALL of your tweets
Yes – all of them. This is particularly important at events because there will be a large number of posts flowing continuously through the conference Twitter feed. A simple text-only tweet can easily get lost in the shuffle.
Tip #3: Go live
Now that Twitter has integrated Periscope into its platform, users can live-stream within the channel. So don’t be shy. Live-streaming is a great excuse for getting in front of prospective customers. Just start with a simple question, like “which has been your favorite session so far?”
Tip #4: Don’t be too promotional
Listen – we know you spent thousands of dollars to attend this conference, so it’s only natural you’ll want to push your products or services as much as possible. But don’t overdo it. And if you must, be casual about it. Look for ways to subtly direct people to your products or solutions. For example, if there were a big announcement during the conference that relates to a recent piece of news about your company, that might be a good way to drive traffic to your website.
Tip #5: Make friends with the conference organizer
This is very important. The host of the conference is the most valuable person to get in front of. He or she is going to be the one who drives and controls the online conversation from start to finish. Therefore, I recommend building a relationship with this person before the show begins. If done properly, the organizer will often retweet and engage with your content throughout the show – allowing you to get in front of key influencers and target audiences.
These are just a few of the tricks I’ve learned for using Twitter successfully at events. I’ll share more with you in a future post.
