Twitter for Conferences

I’ve been asked by a couple of people involved in organ­ising con­fer­ences why they should have a con­fer­ence Twit­ter account, so I fig­ure it’s a gen­er­al enough ques­tion to be worth blog­ging. Basic­ally, it’s all about start­ing or con­tinu­ing your con­ver­sa­tion with those who attend, or might attend, or have atten­ded, or are inter­ested in the sub­jects your con­fer­ence covers.

If we take that as a start­ing point, then that answers the “why”, and Twit­ter itself answers the “how”, so we’re more or less left with the “what” (as in, what to tweet). Of course it depends on what sort of con­fer­ence you’re run­ning. One way to look at them is pre‑, dur­ing, and post-conference.

Pre-con­fer­ence: use twit­ter as an adjunct to the con­fer­ence web site, to remind people of impend­ing dead­lines, tell them of the new speak­ers who are signed up, or the new tracks that have been added. Even the fact that you’re get­ting the plan­ning com­mit­tee togeth­er is tweet-worthy, as it tells people the con­fer­ence is being planned, even if the web site does­n’t show it yet (and we all know how long it often takes to update the con­fer­ence web site). If the hotel is about to sell out, let people know. If fun swag has arrived for the attendees, let them know that too.

This is also the right time to tweet about art­icles or blog posts the speak­ers have writ­ten (point­ing out they’re speak­ing, of course), or news items related to the sub­ject of the conference. 

Dur­ing the con­fer­ence: you can remind people about today’s social events, tell them of changes to the sched­ule, remind them where the exhib­its are if you have an exhib­it hall. Point to people who are live-blog­ging the event, if any. Remind people which tag to use for pho­tos. I’d advise against tweet­ing so much inform­a­tion that people are pay­ing more atten­tion to the con­fer­ence tweets than the speak­ers; con­tests and the like can be dan­ger­ous for this reas­on (unless it’s a con­fer­ence based on twitter).

Post-con­fer­ence: point to blogs, write-ups, and photo pools from the event, let people know when plan­ning for the next one starts, ask for sug­ges­tions for speak­ers and top­ics for the next one.

A couple of tips about fol­low­ers: fol­low people who fol­low you, except for obvi­ous spam­mers or mar­keters. Con­sider fol­low­ing all the speak­ers you can. Don’t worry too much about how many fol­low­ers the con­fer­ence account has; if every speak­er retweets only the tweets about them, you’ll still pass the word around to people who by defin­i­tion should be inter­ested in the con­fer­ence con­tent.I’m sure there are oth­er ideas for con­tent, but these will at least get you started.