twitter

Believe it or not, Twitter is 7 years old, has more than 500 million registered users who send out 340 million tweets on a daily basis. However, it still seems to be the most misunderstood and misused social channel out there. When I engage in social media training, the two questions I always receive are:

"How do I use Twitter?"

"Why should I use it?"

Adam Barrell, Founder of Tweet Perth and Anna Francis from Blue Claws Search recently wrote two blog posts on tips and techniques to make the most of Twitter. Below is a summation of their posts with my "Twitter-Dee" inputs as they relate to the meeting industry. 

Twitter-Dee Tip #1: Have a Goal
 
How do you want to use Twitter for your meeting? If you rent iPads and pre-load Twitter onto the tablets, are you going to teach attendees how to use it? Creating a hashtag for your meeting is a great way for attendees to see comments and ask questions on a real-time basis. Since many Millennials use Twitter frequently, it might be a good idea to have them give attendees who don't know the how or why of Twitter a little tutorial about it. 
 
Twitter-Dee Tip #2: Make Speaker and Sponsor Searches Easy
 
Let's say you post under your event hashtag all the information about your speakers, exhibitors and sponsors — via URL links. So rather than each attendee trying to scroll through the hundreds of tweets since the conference has started, they can enter the following:
 
#yourhashtag filter:links
 
and it will only bring up the tweets with your URLs. 
 
Twitter-Dee Tip #3: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Searches
 
Don't want to scroll through the hashtag to find pics of the event? Put in the search box the following:
 
"pic.twitter.com" OR "instagr.am" #yourhashtag
 
And voila all the photographs from your event will be in one central location. Great for posting on a video wall rental unit or digital signage. 
 
Twitter-Dee Tip #4: Embedding Tweets is a Beautiful Thing 
 
Event blog posts are great and now you can easily embed a tweet into the post and allow attendees to retweet, reply or favor that tweet without leaving the page. You can also do the same thing with Vine videos. Here are two examples: