To Tweet or Not to Tweet

If you are using Twitter for your business, you have no doubt used Twitter to promote an event or product. But, have you ever thought about live Tweeting from an event itself?

Live Tweeting is a great way to give an insider's view of your event. People hear directly from you what is happening when it is happening. It's also a great way to emphasize important points and drive followers to learn more about you by sending them to your website.

We often live Tweet from our bigger events (think Innovate or ATHENA). In fact, we'll be live Tweeting from our next big event, the Accelerate Upstate conference, on August 4 & 5 (follow us on Twitter @BNPartnership and look for the #Accelerate hashtag).

But sometimes it is difficult to determine when live Tweeting is appropriate. Here are five tricks for getting the most out of your live Tweeting.

1. Pick the right event. Ideally, the event you want to live Tweet would be interesting to the vast majority of your followers. For us, we tend to live Tweet from our signature events and a few of our other events where the messaging is of interest to people who couldn't make the event.



2. Create a #hashtag for your event and start using it weeks in advance as part of your Twitter promotion. Hashtags are a great way to put your Tweets into categories.The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or a topic in a Tweet. We're using #Accelerate for the Accelerate Upstate event.
   


3. Tweet as often as is needed, but not too much. Keep Tweets to a minimum ... hit only the high points. If you feel like you need a lot of Tweets from the event, start a separate account just for that event. If possible, start that new Twitter account well before the event and try to recruit followers who might be interested in that event to follow the new account. But you should only set up a new account if you are prepared to use it!
   


4. Follow regular good practices on Twitter. When you find a relevant, useful tweet from someone else at the same event, retweet them. Reply to people who ask you questions. Thank people for helping you out. (Twitter is a great way to thank sponsors and other presenters ... we'll be thanking all of our sponsors at #Accelerate Upstate, especially title sponsor BlueCross BlueShield of Western New York).



5. Don’t #go #hashtag #crazy in your Tweets at the event. It’s OK to use a hashtag in moderation, as in one or two at most per Tweet, but anything more than that will annoy your followers.
   


6. If possible, post photos, quotes from people at the event and any observations that you truly think will be useful to your followers.

These are just a few tricks to get you started on live Tweeting. Do you have any others?