Written by Amber Ooley, digital strategist at Swim.
Twitter is an amazing social channel, and it’s the only one that comes to mind when I’m heading to an event.
If you haven’t used Twitter yet, please go create an account before we get started—it’ll take two minutes.
Now, let’s set you up for successful event coverage. I’ll use Zenith Digital Marketing Conference as an example, since that’s just one week away.
First, create or subscribe to a list of all the speakers and influential attendees.
If you’re attending or want to follow #Zenith2016, you can subscribe to this list.
Next, set yourself up with a dashboard, like Hootsuite or TweetDeck, and connect your personal and business Twitter accounts.
In these dashboards you can create streams of hashtags, users and mentions to stay on top of all conversations during the event.
PRO TIP: keep your personal accounts in a different dashboard than your business accounts to avoid accidental tweets. (Thanks, Lisa Buyer!)
IFTTT is another great tool to help you be more productive during events. For example, you could automatically add users to a list that @mention you.
Click here to see all of the IFTTT Twitter recipes.
Once your dashboard is set up, open up a new document and write a few starter tweets to have in your back pocket.
A couple examples:
Coffee in hand and we’re ready for a full day of learning at #Zenith2016! What are you most excited about?
Thanks for speaking at #Zenith2016, (@name)! Your session was full of great tips and tools.
A few other things you could add to this document:
- Your agenda
- Hashtags related to this event
- Login credentials
- Wifi information
Congratulations! You’re now ready to tweet your socks off.
And just in case you’re still feeling overwhelmed, just remember:
- You don’t have to write all the tweets. RT! RT! RT!
- But, don’t just blindly RT, either. Add your own comment or take to the tweet you’re quoting.
- Focus on taking good notes and pull out a few quotes to tweet when the speaker takes a breather
- Utilize your team members to help carry the social sharing-load
Check out our post on Conference Attending 101 and follow along with us during #Zenith2016: @swimcreative.