Using Twitter for live events

You can’t fail to miss the use of Twitter at most industry events now. Using Twitter around a live event offers:

An opportunity to promote the event before, during and after
Increase engagement from the audience by bringing their voice into the conversation
Collate key points and share with those who weren’t able to attend

Here’s some tools that might help you better integrate Twitter in to your event.

Hash tag

This is your starting point for tagging all conversations around an event or topic. You need something short (you don’t want to use up valuable characters just to tag tweets) and make sure people know to use it.

http://hashtag.org/

Twapper Keeper

Twitter doesn’t archive tweets for very long. If you set up this service before you start to use the hash tag it will collate and organise them for you.

http://twapperkeeper.com/

Twitterfall

Twitterfall does a number of useful things, but for events it’s a nice way to display them if you’re wanting to put something up on abig screen or even just track the conversation yourself.

http://twitterfall.com/

Tinker

From Glam Media, the embeddable widget from this service allows you to show hash tagged conversation directly on your site which is a cool idea [Haven't tried this out yet, anyone have any feedback?]

http://tinker.com/

ParaTweet

Here’s one for the mods, ParaTweet allows you to moderate hash tagged tweets before they appear. While it might seem counter to the spirit of Twitter you may want to protect your event from being embarassingly hijacked or if you’re discussing a sensitive topic – especially if you have a big screen displaying everything tagged.