By Janette Speyer, Web Success Team – 

Are you planning to host an event to promote your services? In today’s digital environment, a solid percentage of almost any audience will be a Twitter user. Our job as an agency is to create conversations and engagement for our brands with the objective of garnering an interest for guest and attendees. In this post I will share some of the techniques we use to “buzz up” your event.  

2-Weeks Prior to the Event – Setting the Stage

This is the time to start planning your event and creating a concise strategy with goals and objectives. Get a clear idea of what you want to achieve from your Twitter campaign. Once you have a direction now you can rev up that campaign with the following:

• Create content for tweets: You have a message to send to your followers. Write content that will resonate with your audience and give them a compelling reason to attend your event. For example, ask questions: “Would you be interested in….?” or “Are you going to X event?”
• Create a simple branded hashtag and register it with Twubs.com. This will help you follow conversations and give you an idea of what your audience wants.

• Follow the trade show hashtag to get ideas of what event conversations are taking place so you can make decisions on what spontaneous tweets you want to share. Be sure to retweet and answer post that mention your handler or your hashtag.

• Recruit brand ambassadors that would tweet on your behalf at your event. Your loyal followers can sometime be your best brand advocates. Be sure to offer them an incentive to tweet.

• Tweet video messages: use vine or vsnap to showcase your brand and send fun quirky messages to your loyal followers. This will make you event fun and light.

At the Event – Capturing the Buzz Have you ever been to an event with so many people that you can’t imagine talking to all of them and you only engage a few people? Twitter allows you to globally engage not only event attendees, but to all the followers at large. So this is an opportunity to:

• Mange the Twitter feed: Someone has to be present to do this task. Many conversations will be taking place and they all have to be addressed so that you get the maximum benefit from your tweet-up.

• Start a general conversationabout the event. For example: “Welcome to…#MyEvent; so glad you are here” – to make your guest feel welcome and happy to be present. Also engage people that are Retweeting your posts, answer their questions, encourage sharing.

• Offer a door prize and get people to retweet the winner’s names. This promotes excitement and interest

• Get a Twitter feed: It’s well worth the money to have a large screen featuring the tweets taking place. This is great way to break the ice and to keep guest engaged in your event.

The Aftermath Now that the event was over, check your analytics. We use Hashtrack and Tweetreach to capture impressions and accounts reached. We have to be accountable to our customers. Twitter is a powerful communications tool that can not only help sell your event but it can really create buzz and we all need an extra pair of long legs for our campaigns.

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