By now, you’ve seen industries around the world and businesses big and small using social media to increase audience engagement. This method of marketing has continued to gain in popularity as a reputable means for sharing information and pulling in customers. One of the most recent avenues of expanding audiences in scholarly conferences has come from a surprising medium - Twitter.

Live videos on Facebook seemed to be running the race not too long ago, but now live-tweeting is the preferred medium of choice in conferences. It is now considered a necessary tool that must be used strategically by those who put on the conferences. Done right, it’s the perfect way to increase your audience engagement and share important information. Twitter does have a character limit on your posts, but with these tips, you can live-tweet your conferences and pull in a wider audience easily.

What’s Tweeting, Anyway?

Yes, the Twitter logo is a bird, but that’s as close as tweeting gets to our feathery friends. Twitter is a social media forum that is used by news agencies and the general public to share headlines and breaking reports, pass on links to followers, and, of course, build memes for recognition.

It’s also a place where friends can hang out and chat online, and new friends are made through followers. Twitter is, however, public, unless you adjust your privacy settings.

When you post on Twitter’s feed, it’s called a tweet. These usually show up chronologically, with new tweets at the top and older tweets on the bottom. Text tweets have a 180 character limit, and you can put links, videos, photos, and GIFs on them.

Tips for Live Tweets

Live tweeting is a new and popular medium used at big events and conferences. You can follow those who are tweeting by looking for what’s called a hashtag (#) with the event name behind it. If there’s a live going on, you’ll be able to click on the “live” tab to see what everyone’s talking about.

From there, make sure you turn on the notifications on your mobile device so you’ll get all the newest Tweets. That way, you don’t have to be online actively to find out what’s going on and get the latest information on the event.

If you’re putting the conference on, all you have to do is make sure you go into the Live stream and set up hashtags ahead of time so your attendees can do this back-end part and share your conference with their followers, too!

Another tip is to use Tweetdeck to customize your conference tweets. With this app, you can create different lists with specific people on them. The app will follow their tweets directly, so instead of going through hundreds or thousands of people you’re following, you’ll make sure to never miss the tweets here.

Make Your Event the Talk of Twitter

Live tweeting of your conference is a marketing strategy that requires planning ahead. You know the saying: Failing to plan is planning to fail. This definitely applies to getting a wider audience for your conference!

Before the event, make sure you research all the names and proper spelling of everyone who is involved in the conference. Any misspellings can offend someone, of course, but they can also result in your audience searching for the wrong people to follow. Know the Twitter handles so you can share them correctly.

Take some time to design images before the conference. With templates already in place, you can easily insert real-time pictures behind a background with the event hashtag or your logo on them. Since you’ve done this early, the turnaround time to get the pictures out and market your event’s information is done while the iron is still hot.

Create your live tweeting hashtags and walk through the steps you’ll need to do to start a live tweet. Set up different streams if you have to; for instance, one may be necessary for the presenters to know of any changes going on in real-time, and another would be for the attendees to share what they’re seeing and thinking.

Come up with a few impressive tweets guaranteed to grab your audience’s attention beforehand. You already have the schedule, so it’s easy to put together tweets for each big speaker or idea that will be going on throughout the conference. Put these on your schedule and tweet them throughout the day!

Your conference can easily be the talk of Twitter, and you might even find yourself going viral.