Association Meetings: Using Twitter & Other Forms of Social Media at your Events

The use of Social Networks, Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, Flickr and My Space have become almost common place in both the personal and professional business arenas.  Best practices using social media are developing rapidly .. and now, when preparing for an event, or even moreso, during an event, social media is quickly becoming a popular and evidently, beneficial strategy.

For example, Dan Thornton presents an interesting guide to live twitting from events - guest posted by Julius Solaris, blogger and event planner extraordinaire.  “Twitter allows you to capture conversations in a great unbiased manner and therefore should be used for most if not all conferences, tradeshows and events in general. The 140chars nature of the service pushes attendees to actually summarize what is going on and synthesize the content in a great way. Making your event more compliant with new technologies is the way to go and you may be missing out on precious feedback and content if you fail to do so.”

You might also want to take a look at EventManagerBlog. where 5 ways to visualize Twitter at events is expanded upon.  Ben Parr at Mashable writes an excellent 5 step article on how to plan and promote events using social media.  Of course, he elaborates  on the use of Twitter, “When the day comes and everyone is arriving, be sure that you keep people happy and that you’ve optimized your event to create additional buzz. You didn’t do all of this work just to have people complain over Twitter, did you?

Have high-speed wireless available – this allows people to tweet and converse more easily. Promote following the event’s Twitter account for event updates. Don’t forget to have a unique hashtag for the event. Have a web page or even a giant whiteboard where people can share their social media contact information too.”

No doubt, the social web can have a measurable impact on the business needs of your association.  While more and more businesses are experimenting with Social Media during their events and some have ideas to start using Twitter and FB – we would love to hear of your experience?   Drop us a note and tell us to how you plan to use Social Media at your upcoming event. Check back for how we have helped our clients and the association industry use social media at their events!