The Art of Live-Tweeting

I love live-tweeting events. It’s the perfect digital wallflower activity for creating buzz.

This weekend I lent my smarts and my fast-typing fingers to the Imagination Festival in Glasgow’s South Side.

The event was a 3-day programme rich with fantastic speakers covering areas of ideas, culture, history and politics in Scotland. Independence was discussed, along with topics ranging from ambiguity to gender, violence to empathy, and all topics were discussed with intelligence and humour in the relaxed and welcoming venues The Glad Cafe and Govanhill Baths.

Can you tell I had a great time? More to the point — what was I doing there? The event organisers hired me to make some noise on social media — both to raise awareness of the event and to save some of its highlights for posterity.

Here are my tips for successful live-tweeting.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams speaking at TED

Part I – Selling It

The key to live-tweeting is to alert your followers and target audience to the event. But it doesn’t begin on the day.

Ideally this begins with a content strategy during the conception of the event, consisting of a marketing phase where information about the event will be shared with the target audience.

In my work, this usually involves content marketing. This stage should should give a sense of what to expect from the event. It should also provide useful content on the topic of the event, as well fulfilling the end game: selling tickets.

Part II – Amplifying It

During the event, this means creating content — usually tweets and short live blogs — to capture the essence of goings-on.

TIP: You have to have a hashtag. You have to advertise it. You have to use it on the official social media presence of the event.

Look at how many of these trending topics are topical events.

Make your hashtag short, and make it easy to understand.

If you have to add a few characters to avoid a random mess of letters and numbers, go for it.

If you can make the hashtag the same as your handle, you’ve hit the jackpot.

Before the Event

Now that you’ve got your hashtag in place and you’ve teased, sold tickets, and reached the opening day, it’s time to get snapping.

TIP: I like to capture a photographs from around the venue. This could be the exterior, a queue of eager attendees, delicious shots of the snacks inside (Imagination Festival’s breakfast caterer Bakery47 are especially adept at this!), and a sneak peek behind the scenes.

During the Event

Now on to the good stuff. Your audience is in place, your speakers or performers are taking the stage, and it’s time to get tweeting.

TIP: Keep your audience in mind: you’re tweeting for an audience inside and outside the venue. Don’t be afraid to narrate a little. As one speaker takes the stage, tweet their name and their topic of choice. Use their handle where you can.

Tweets are short, so try to distil down the speakers’ best points into a tasty tidbit, and get tweeting. I like to grab soundbites as I go and post these as quotes, crediting the speaker by @mention, and adding the hashtag. Voila!

If your audience is primed (and having a good time!) they’ll be tweeting too. Keep tabs open with the hashtag search, your Mentions, and RT a smattering of audience responses.

Make use of their image tweets while you’re stuck at the back of the auditorium. They may even post really creative updates, like Neil’s Vine above. These are all great signs of an engaged audience experience.

FAQ: How many times should I tweet? There really is no upper limit on tweets. Try to be consistent throughout each item on your event schedule. If people know your event is ongoing, they’ll choose whether to follow or unfollow. As long as you can spell it carefully, include

After the Event

After the event, keep tweeting! Sure, it’s no longer live, but it’s still real-time engagement.

By keeping the conversation going, you can ensure that important conversations spurred by your event will continue to thrive.

If it’s a regular event, be sure to keep activity going throughout the off-season. This keeps your brand alive, relevant, and increases all those good things like brand value, advocacy, visibility and awareness. It takes a little time, but it’s totally worthwhile. Don’t surprise your followers by appearing out of nowhere once a year.

Part III – Saving It

As I mentioned above, saving live-tweeting highlights from the event for posterity is a huge part of the live-tweeting process. Save it, share it, and celebrate it!

You wouldn’t want to lose gorgeous content like the above, now, would you?

Tools like Storify are the perfect way to grab highlights and fun content posted live at your event. All you do is sign in, search for your tweets and/or your hashtag, and start dragging your favourite tweets into the timeline to tell your story. For example, Edinburgh Book Festival is especially good at this.

Here is the Imagination Festival Storify by co-organizer Roanne Dods.

TIP: I also like to curate my own Twitter stories by using the Twitter embed code directly into a blog post. Favourite the best posts as you go and grab that embed code later.

Your Turn!

Have you tried live-tweeting events? What has your experience been like?

If you need a hand building social buzz for your own event, click here to get in touch and let’s see if we can work together.

––

Fancy receiving a free monthly newsletter from nicolabalkind.com? Sign up here.

Keeping it Relevant on Social Media

By Nicola Balkind

Spot the Difference

What’s the difference between a traditional marketing strategy and organic social media marketing?

It’s not about who people are. It’s not their age, their hobby, their married mommy or single teen demographics. Not anymore.

Organic social media marketing is about connecting with what your audience is talking about. It’s also about keeping it relevant.

What Are They Talking About?

When you’re running a year-round social media presence, you’re looking for daily content to post everywhere and anywhere.

Let’s be honest, it can get pretty draining.

The best social media content connects with relevant topics and relates to people – ideally those in your target audience – through shared discussions. It’s the community part of community management.

Whether someone is a gardener or a hairdresser doesn’t matter. If they’re watching The Real Housewives of Wherever together and simultaneously live-tweeting jokes about the Teresa’s poor landscaping job, what matters is that they’re engaging with the event as it happens.

So how do we leverage this for our own purposes without over- or under-estimating our audiences?

Know Your Audience

Look at what your followers and fans are posting about. Are they live-tweeting about the political events in Ferguson, or are they having a collective fangasm over the latest episode of Doctor Who?

While there may be some overlap, taking the temperature will tune you into what your audience knows and cares about beyond your brand.

This is the part where your social media content planning calendar comes into play. When you know what your audience cares about and how it relates to your brand and larger offering, you can plan ahead and work your content around upcoming events.

Planning Ahead

Social media platforms know these strategies work. That’s why Google has its famous daily Google Doodle. Those don’t happen in a day – they’re planned out months in advance.

It’s also why Twitter has its own event planner – #OwntheMoment. Bookmark it and keep it on hand – but, as I said above, don’t go too crazy. Stick to the topics most relevant to your brand.

These examples should gives you plenty of ammunition for shareable upcoming events that you might want to tweet, blog, and create content around – but it’s up to you to select the holidays and events that are most relevant to your audience.

Some other great tools for this are On This Day calendars (here are 2 great ones from Wikipedia and BBC). While these may take some time to comb through, you’ll quickly know what you’re looking for.

For example, when I worked at Quotables, we had a Google Calendar filled with key dates like famous authors birthdays, momentous quotable occasions (like the dates of famous speeches); writing and reading holidays like NaNoWriMo, Banned Books Week and Roald Dahl Day, and so on.

For Example…

Here are a few guideline categories to help you think about how to approach holidays and events:

The no-brainer. Let’s say you are Starbucks. It’s August. The dog days of summer, at last. What are you gonna talk about? Probably your infamous fall treat the Pumpkin Spice Latte!
Think twice. Let’s say you’re a beauty company. It’s January. Are you going to talk about the Superbowl? Likely not – unless your (probably largely female) audience is chatting about the event. Don’t go crazy with those gifs without doing your research first.
The no-go. Let’s say you’re a web design agency that specialises in conceptual sites for artists. Are your audience going to appreciate your tweets about the latest cricket match? Likely not. (Unless conceptual artists are really into that shit.)

Current Events

While you’re able to plan ahead for holidays, relevant events, and any other specific dates, topics will also pop up that you can’t have anticipated.

My Current Events tweeting mantra is simple: Keep It Relevant, Keep it Light.

Unless you’re an investigative journalist, you probably want to keep your event tweeting light-hearted. Stick to entertainment and avoid current events. (Unless, of course, you particularly want to be like Belvedere or Kenneth Cole. In which case I probably can’t help you.)

Get Going!

The best way to start is to get moving with that social media calendar!

What are they key dates that your fans and followers care about? Even if they’re months in advance, plug them into your calendar now and start thinking about what relevant content you can create around them. You’ll be amazed how much it will flesh out your content planner and fuel your ideas for dates closer to today.

How do you plan your relevant, shareable content?

Can I help you with your content planning? If so, get in touch.

––

Fancy receiving a free monthly newsletter from nicolabalkind.com? Sign up here.

How To Schedule Your Social Media Updates

By Nicola Balkind

Did you know that you can automate your social media updates?

If yes, are you doing it effectively?

Here are some of my tips for how to make the most of scheduling your tweets, Facebook posts, and other social updates.

Why Schedule Social Media Updates?

1. Scheduling your social media updates saves time.

Many of the projects I work on involve social media strategy and community management.

Why do those clients need me?

Well, it’s two-fold. One reason is that they don’t have the skills to establish their social media presence and grow an online community around their brand. Another reason is that they don’t have the time.

2. Scheduling your content makes it better.

Plotting out your social media updates gives you a clearer picture of what you’re putting out there.

Posting on a day-to-day basis is fine, but dipping in and out of your channels can become disorienting. You might forget to post an all-important reminder before a deadline passes, or you could be pushing your self-promotion activity ad nauseum.

Planning out your activity ahead will help you to clear up these issues, share content at the optimal times, and save time overall.

3. Scheduling = Optimising

Only about 46% of Twitter users log on at least once per day – and only 39% log in twice or more per day. (Source: Laura Roeder.)

You need to catch them while they’re online. More on this below.

Social Media Scheduling Tools

So now that you’re convinced that you should schedule your updates, and have a content calendar in place, it’s time to think about scheduling tools.

There are tons out there from full-scale decks like HootSuite (online) and TweetDeck (for desktop) to drag-and-drops like Buffer. I’d point you towards Buffer.

Buffer is a simple and easy-to-use client which defines a number of pre-determined times to disseminate your Tweets or other social media updates. As you add updates to your Buffer, it drops them into these time slots and pushes them out automatically.

You can also schedule specific times for updates to go out.

Bonus Tip:

My favourite aspect of Buffer – as with most apps I use – is the Chrome Extension.

This extension allows you to click a button on the page you are visiting, and it will automatically build an update with the page title and link.

I use this daily to share articles.

Click here to learn more about the Buffer Extension for Chrome.

Optimising Your Social Media Schedule

Tweriod Analysis form my own Twitter account

Once you have your social media calendar in place, and you’ve found a scheduling tool that works for you, the next step is optimising those scheduled time slots.

Optimising your social media updates ensures that you are sending information out into the world while your audience is listening.

While Buffer and HootSuite have in-built features which select the optimal times for your posts, services like Tweriod do one better: they analyse when your audience is online and active.

The best part? You can have Tweriod analyse your results and integrate them back into Buffer.

Need a Hand?

How do you handle your social media updates?

Are you sticking to a schedule, or is your content awry?

Learn more about my community management services, or get in touch to find out how I can help.