The importance of twitter at events

Posted by Joshua Nutt on 31st October 2016

Tags Social Media

Live-tweeting at an event can be quite a daunting task, and what can make it even more daunting is having your tweets displayed on a wall at the event for everyone to see.

Do your tweets make sense? Did you spell everything correctly? Did you tweet quickly enough or is it now no longer relevant? These are all questions that rush through your mind.

However, it has its obvious advantages too. I live tweeted at an event last week for the Sheffield City Region Growth Hub where they aimed to get all delegates and stakeholders up-to-speed on what was currently happening with the Growth Hub.

Analysing the statistics after the event, and of the 88 people that attended, 69 different accounts tweeted at some point during the day, whether that was from their personal account, or from their business account. The event was a resounding success, and the use of a Tweet Wall meant that more people tweeted and thus got the Growth Hub trending in Sheffield on Twitter therefore raising Growth Hub’s profile within the city region. Not bad for an event that was simply to get stakeholders up-to-speed.

Here are some things that I noted about what you’ll need to remember when live-tweeting and what to do afterwards…

  • Get everyone on Wi-Fi and have your password displayed throughout the venue. Nobody wants to be using data.

  • Make sure the Wi-Fi at the event is capable of handling numbers you’re expecting. You don’t want the Wi-Fi going down halfway through.

  • Have a tweet wall. It’s a great way to get people tweeting more and they’ll be encouraged to tweet to see their profile on the big screen. We’d always recommend moderation on the tweet wall software, just in case one slips through the net.

  • As well as having your event hashtag displayed throughout, remind and encourage people at the start of the day and throughout to tweet and use the event hashtag.

  • Get as many hands on deck as possible. Do you know people at the event? Network with them beforehand and encourage them to tweet. Once you get the ball rolling, the tweets will start flying in and make the event a huge success. This then gives you the added benefit of simply retweeting something someone else has captured, if you missed it or weren’t able to type quick enough.

  • Create a storyboard of your tweets afterwards and run some statistics. Get the facts and figures to show that the event was a huge success from the varying analytical platforms out there.