Tweeting at Meetings: How to Increase Your Event’s Impact via Twitter

A frequent question that meeting planners face is: How can we engage those who aren’t able to attend? Luckily, as the use of social media grows, people who aren’t physically present can still reap many of the benefits of your event in real time.

Dedicating a Twitter feed to your meeting extends an invitation to anyone who might benefit from what you and your meeting participants have to say. By enabling you to share key messages and updates from the event, Twitter gives remote participants and others the opportunity to get involved, and therefore to become active supporters of your program or project.

Here are some best practices for leveraging the power of Twitter leading up to and during your meeting:

Use a hashtag. The # symbol, called a “hashtag” in Twitter parlance, is added to the beginning of a word; it categorizes messages by marking keywords or topics in a tweet. Your event’s hashtag should be brief and easy to remember. Market the hashtag in all promotional and communication materials you send to participants and others about the event, and post it prominently at the gathering. When participants conduct a Twitter search using the hashtag, they’ll find all tweets relevant to the meeting—yours and those of other online participants.

Pre-write tweets. Promote your meeting and its Twitter feed by posting tweets to your feed in advance of the event. Many of your official tweets can be written before the event; they might include major agenda items, key points from presentation slides, and links (more on this below). Of course, you’ll need to be flexible as new developments arise, and you will want to continue tweeting “live” as well. Still, having prewritten tweets can alleviate the stress of live tweeting and reduce lulls in your online conversation.

Link, link, link! By including links to background information and relevant Web sites, you lend substance to your feed. For example, you might link to presenters’ recent publications, or to news stories that demonstrate the need for a particular community project or line of research under discussion. Items with links are also more likely to be “re-tweeted” by those following your Twitter feed; this re-tweeting expands your virtual audience.

“Handle” it. Consider including the Twitter “handle” or user name of other parties you reference in a tweet. (Handles begin with @–for instance, @RWJF_HumanCap.) Those whose handle you posted can see your tweet when they click on their “mentions” tab, expanding your reach still further. Include in your tweets the handles of speakers and meeting participants, and you’ll help others on Twitter learn more about the speakers and their work.

Ask questions. By occasionally posing a question over Twitter that asks for your followers’ perspectives or experience related to items on the meeting agenda, you encourage robust participation and make your feed more conversational. This is yet another way to promote re-tweeting.

Taking these steps before the meeting and assigning one or more staff to stay on top of the Twitter feed as it evolves during the meeting, can keep many of your participants fully engaged in what’s happening—and quite possibly increase both the virtual and in-person attendance at your next event.