If you work for a membership organization, a policy group, or a civic organization, you may find yourself working round-the-clock to build — and keep — an engaged membership or constituent base.
Something that’s commonplace on Twitter is live-tweeting events. If you’re a community organizer, elected official, advocate, or membership organization, you could easily begin to use live-tweeting to grow your next meeting or event past the “real life” audience and onto your larger #AstroNetTurfRoots community.
If you’re having a meeting (of any size) you can set up live-tweeting. Here’s how:
Before Your Meeting or Event:
- Get/establish event hashtag, like #MoberlyChamber or #JeffCityTownHall
- Put the hashtag on your registration website and published materials, and make sure the audience (online and in IRL) know that that’s the hashtag for the event.
- Tell your real-life and Twitter audiences that you’ll be live-tweeting.
- Engage your meeting or event’s speakers online using their Twitter handles
- Create and share a “follow list” IRL and online (include speakers, leaders, guests, and other participants on this list)
- Use a client like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck (3rd party partners) to follow the Twitter conversation about your event more efficiently.
During the Meeting or Event:
You’re in the room during the event, and you have the twitter handles of your speakers. When those speakers share memorable or quote-worthy things, tweet those quotes out to your followers. Be sure to include the speaker’s handle (@name) and the event #.
- Quote speakers using their handles (I like to call these “tweetable moments”)
- Pick and choose the best content, even if you need to take notes and share the content a few minutes later
- Take and share photos of your audience & your speakers (Having a photo link in your Twitter stream will increase your interaction by 20{628954cb2bad821921117287c23504a7919be1893c483613421612ad8712cddb})
- Watch the conversation around the hashtag that you’ve created, and interact with the people who are saying good (or bad) things about your event. (You’ll guarantee more success, connection with your audience by doing this.)
- Hashtag your geographic location, too (#STL, #JCMO, etc). Hashtagging your location goes a long way toward helping the people in the area learn more about your organization or cause.
After the Meeting or Event:
- Thank new and old followers for support your event. Call individuals out by name (@) for their engagement
- Write a blog post (tools like storify.com are great for this) that puts the tweets about the event in one place, and share it with your followers
- Use hastracking.com to track your traffic & the ripple effect created by your live tweeting of the event.
Live-tweeting your next public meeting or event will help you build — and engage — an #AstroNetTurfRoots audience that is passionate about your cause.
One final point for you to consider: Social media (including Twitter) changes constantly. Your goal shouldn’t be to follow hard-and-fast rules from an alleged “social media expert”, but to apply — and test — best practices with your audiences. And when you think you’ve found what works, test it again! You might be surprised at how frequently social media platforms make changes that impact you.
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Thanks for the time,
