ISES Denver

Blog entry

How to Twitter

posted Thursday, September 8th, 2011 by Editor

Who should I follow? What should I tweet? And who cares what Ashton Kutcher had for lunch?

For many people, Twitter is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. The stripped-down nature of Twitter makes it daunting to know where to begin, but it is this stripped-down nature of Twitter that also makes it such a flexible and powerful tool.

So here’s a quick guide for friends in the Special Event industry on how to get started, how to tweet, and an overview of some of the cool features.

 

Community

Twitter is about building community, finding people with similar interests, and engaging in conversation. Like most social media, Twitter works best when it facilitates two-way conversation. Twitter is not a great place to pitch your company or your product as it smacks too much of spam and tends to be a one-way broadcast. But Twitter is a good place to build relationships that can lead to sales.

Who should I follow?

The quality of your Twitter experience depends on the quality of your Twitter community so finding the right people to follow is your first challenge. These are the people that you will be conversing with.

Fortunately for ISES Denver members, we have an active community of local industry people who are on Twitter, so getting started is easy. Go to twitter.com/isesdenver and click on our “Lists” tab to see the people who are “members” or “friends.” Read a few of their tweets and decide if they seem like interesting people to follow.

What should I tweet?

Tweets are a status update. They allow you to give your followers a glimpse into your life. The basic rule of Twitter is to tweet about something that you’re passionate about. If your tweets are interesting, and if people find them valuable, then an audience will find you and follow you. Again it’s worth warning, trying to sell your product or service is probably the least interesting thing you can tweet. If you must do it, do it sparingly.

Another way to tweet is to share links to blog posts or articles that you found useful, or share interesting photos, or help a friend by retweeting a post that you liked, or inform others of what’s happening as it happens, or spark a conversation by asking for advice.

More power

Once you are comfortable interacting on a basic level, sharing in the conversation, making interesting contributions to your community, you can begin to take your twittering to an expert level.

Lists

Twitter offers a feature called “Lists” to help you manage your Twitter feed. As you follow more and more people you may discover that you want to give special attention to a particular group of people. “Lists” allows you to create more focused Twitter feeds. For example you might create a list of people in the Event Industry, or a list of people who tweet about activities in your city, or a list of businesses that tweet special discounts. “Lists” are a way to listen more closely to the conversations that are important to you.

Going mobile

If you have a smart phone there are apps available to allow you to tweet from your phone. This allows you to tweet while you are at an event. Tweet from the baseball game, tweet about the band at the festival, tweet about the food at a restaurant. If you are at a conference and you learn something valuable from the speaker, condense it to 140 characters and share it with your friends.

If you don’t have a smart phone, you can still tweet from your cell phone via text messaging. Just log in to your Twitter account and under “Settings” you’ll find a tab for “Mobile.” Give Twitter your cell number so they can match your phone to your Twitter account and you’re all set. Send your tweet as a text message to 40404 and your followers will receive your live updates.

Hash Tags

Hash tags (words marked with the # sign) mark your tweet with a searchable keyword so that people can search tweets by subject. Hash tags are a game-changer because it overrides the usual Follow/Follower model and lets you instantly share with people who have a common interest.

For example, if you are at the Meeting Industry Council’s 2012 Tradeshow and Conference, you can search for #MIC2012 to see what other people are saying about the conference even if you don’t usually follow them on Twitter.

At ISES Denver we live tweeted our Town Hall meeting in August using the #isesdenver hash tag so that people who couldn’t attend that morning could search the hash tag and read the key points. See our earlier blog post here.

Also, you might be interested in searching Twitter for #eventprofs. This is a hash tag used by people from around the world who are in the event industry. The hold weekly Tweet Chats where a moderator poses questions for people to share their expertise and discuss issues of the day in an intense Twitter session.

Time to Tweet

This has been a quick overview of the different ways that you can use Twitter. Remember, Twitter is a place to build relationships and a place to share. The more you give to your Twitter community the more you will earn followers and earn their respect.