Top tips to successfully live-tweet your event

Posted by Luke Marino on 1st June 2017

Tags Public Relations Social Media

Live-tweeting has become a fixture at most conferences, events, webinars, and lectures, for attendees and organisers alike. To capitalise on it, many event organisers assign a person or even a team of people to run social media at their events to ensure it runs smoothly.

So far this year I’ve been out to a couple of events in Yorkshire to carry out live-tweeting, and will be doing so again in a couple of weeks when our director, Kate, hosts a PR masterclass at Wakefield Business Week on the 14th June.

Here, I’ve listed my five top tips for live-tweeting:

  1. Choose a hashtag and create a buzz: Create an appropriate hashtag for the event and promote it in the weeks leading up. Include it in every tweet, banner, image, email, and webpage about the event. You can even use it in your brand's Twitter and Facebook cover photos, or put it into your email signature. Nearer the time, tag in businesses/ speakers into your tweets who have already confirmed they will be attending. This will help persuade them to interact with you and the hashtag, and get others engaging with each other about the event.

  2. Do your homework: Research what the event is about and the companies involved. Also, find out who will be speaking at the event, and what they plan to discuss. This way, you can draft up a few tweets prior to the event. For instance, Joe Bloggs has taken to the stage to talk about XX. Also, listen out for any quotes from speakers that you can use in a tweet.

  3. Mix it up: Use a mixture of words, images and video. Just posting words makes your feed look dull and not very appealing. Think about posting images of the speakers who are up on stage, anything interesting that appears on their Power Point presentation, or, even just a couple of photos of a packed-out event room. Also, consider live-streaming the event through Facebook Live or Periscope as this will allow those not able to attend the event to follow what’s happening.

  4. Stay on top of it: Live-tweeting is fast and furious, and can be stressful at times. However, it’s important to remain relaxed and stay on top of it. Along with carrying out your own tweets, it’s good to re-tweet other people who are contributing to the hashtag, as this makes your feed look busy.

  5. Tweet wall: If you’re hosting the event yourself consider using a tweet-wall to display the tweets sent using a designated event hashtag. Although tweet walls can be expensive, they’re well worth it, and create a different visual from just looking at a presentation or the speaker on stage. 

So, if you’ve been asked to attend an event on behalf of your business, don’t miss out on the opportunity to live-tweet. Not only will it help raise the profile of the event, it will also help promote your own brand and increase engagement.

Need help with live-tweeting? We can live-tweet on your behalf or advise on social media strategy. So if you’re looking for social media support, we’d love to hear from you.