Today’s guest post is by Jason Tucker, a digital marketing executive with
Organic Development.
Twitter can be a useful tool to help raise awareness of and interest in your event.
The fact that you can follow whoever you want gives it advantages over the likes of Facebook, and following key professionals and influencers in your chosen field can quickly gain traction for your event as they retweet or interact with you, in turn passing on information about your event to their followers, who are likely also interested.
That said, there are still some best practices that will help you ensure that you’re not just screaming into the echo chamber that Twitter can become.
Even if you have an active corporate Twitter account, consider building a separate account for your event. This way you can retweet status updates from one account to the other so followers of both accounts are aware of both your event and your organization’s tweets. Give your new account a short and snappy name that sums up immediately what it is about—a long name will eat into the 140 characters you have per tweet. Ensure the bio part of the account has the critical details of what the conference or event is and when and where it’s happening, along with a link to the URL where they can register and find out more.
Once the event account is set up, your first challenge will be attracting followers. This can take some time, so it makes sense to start it as far in advance of the event as possible. Promoting it on your main company account as often as you can is a useful tactic, but consider tweeting key people in your field directly to make them aware of the event account and the event itself. Also contribute where possible to relevant industry hashtags.
Be sure to tweet event updates as often as you can, especially when key details are settled, speakers are confirmed, and itinerary modules firmed up. Of course, do the same for major updates and interesting details. You can encourage interaction and attract interest by asking for pre-event feedback—consider holding an online poll to vote on the content of one session, for example.
Also find out if there are any hashtags around your event topic—if there isn’t one, start one. Use those hashtags in all your tweets and promote them on your event literature to encourage your followers to do the same, remembering again that short and sweet wins the day. It will also help you collect opinions and views while your event is happening.
Finally, if you have an advertising budget, consider using Twitter Ads to get your message out even further than the reach of your followers. You can use promoted tweets, a promoted account, or both. You can fix your daily spending limit, so you don’t have to fear going over budget.
This guide was written in association with Meetings Four You, which offers meeting rooms in Bristol and across the UK.
