Twitter For Dummies
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If you plan events — whether they’re small, impromptu meetups or large weekend workshops or seminars — Twitter can help. You can use Twitter to find speakers, scout locations, score discounts, locate equipment, and drive attendance.

Here’s how you can make the most of Twitter for your event:

  1. Create a landing page.

    Even though you’re doing most of your organizing on Twitter, Twitter itself isn’t feature-heavy enough to provide all of the information to your potential event-goers and volunteers. Make the landing page, sometimes referred to as a microsite, an off-site location for signing up, recording offers of help, and generating interest.

    Your landing page can be a blog, a website, or an event page on a site such as EventBrite or Amiando. Twtvite is another event planning site purposely built for Twitter that incorporates the Twitter avatars and profiles of those who sign up.

  2. Choose a hashtag (keyword) for your event.

    Take a minute to check Hashtags.org or Twitter Search to make sure that no one else is using that hashtag. A unique hashtag will eliminate confusion.

  3. When your event landing page is ready, set up basic alert tracking for your event.

    Several free services, such as Google Alerts and the Sidekick + Zapier integration, meet your basic requirements.

    You can also use a paid media monitoring service such as that offered by HubSpot, called Social Inbox, to track your event. When you need to decide what to track as your keyword, your hashtag is a great place to start. You can also track the venue, the theme, and other related keywords.

  4. Now that you have laid the foundation for tracking interest and attendance to your event, start spreading the word!

    Don’t let talk of the event completely dominate your Twitter stream — you can lose followers that way — but make sure to highlight your event adequately. You can generate interest and allow the Tweet to get legs and be retweeted (RT’d).

If you’re planning something larger than a simple two-hour meetup, make sure to keep up with who has volunteered assistance, who signs up for the event, and venues that have offered help.

Can you plan a full-blown conference by using Twitter as your main tool? Yes, you can! Planning a conference takes a little more finesse than a short business function, but it’s very doable.

If you do plan to go big by organizing a large event on Twitter, keep thorough records to help you manage all the Tweets related to it. You can even use a free tool such as Evernote to track what people have offered to do, who’s coming, and other logistical issues. Coupled with your tracking methods, you may find planning a big event the 140-character way relatively painless.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

Laura Fitton was one of the first marketers to discover the value of Twitter for businesses and society. She founded Twitter app store oneforty.com and sold it to HubSpot. She’s now Inbound Marketing Evangelist for Hubspot. Anum Hussain speaks to thousands on how to effectively use social media - in classrooms, at conferences and even alongside Twitter’s Small Business Team. Brittany Leaning writes about social media strategy for HubSpot’s 1.6 million readers and has managed accounts for several well-known brands.

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