Calling All Troops!

Mambo is honored to have many amazing clients. Today we’re super excited as one of them, Portland’s helmet company Nutcase Helmets, put on their nuttiest gear and headed to Philadelphia for the Philly Bike Expo this weekend.

Being successful at live tweeting doesn’t happen by just showing up at the event. Nutcase has an integrated digital and traditional marketing plan that stretches across all channels. In this week’s blog (and a follow-up, to be posted next week), I provide recommendations for effective live tweeting for an event to complement all the other work done to promote your online presence.

Live Tweeting Phase 1: Before and During the Event

Preparation

• Pull baseline metrics starting a month before and establish key performance indicators.
• Do your research. Identify key influencers. Find thought leaders who will be at the event and start reaching out to them.
• Identify the specific hashtag of the event, your personal campaign hashtag (if you have one), and any others associated with your involvement.
• Alert your followers about your event and give them the event hashtag.
• Specify your messaging strategy. Understand your audience and sync your team so your brand is well represented.
• Delegate specific team members who have experience with Twitter to manage the channel.
• Get involved in the conversation now. Let the organizers and sponsors of the event know you’re listening and start building these relationships.
• Optimize your listening tool. Make sure you have eyes on all the right conversations. Prioritize direct mentions, private messages, and relevant hashtags.
• Create custom bit.ly links so you can easily track your metrics. The start of a conversation isn’t the time to send people back to your website. Ask questions and encourage further engagement so your followers continue to @ reply and retweet you. When a conversation with an individual is coming to a close, invite them then to learn more about your business and your offerings by sending them to a valuable landing page.
• Pre-schedule posts. There will be a lot of information you’ll want to cover and your job at the event will be creating awareness and encouraging engagement. Write ahead of time the tweets you know you’ll want to send. This includes letting people know you’ll be at the event, an entry tweet to start the day, and “thank you” tweets as you’re signing off.

During

• Tweet pivotal moments at the event so your posts are engaging. Be sure not to flood the feeds of your followers with mundane information. Share your perspective, teach them something new, or highlight the most important moments.
• Enrich content with video and photos to make your posts unique and promote brand awareness.
• Be a part of the conversation, not the whole thing. The golden spot for your brand’s content (both original and user-created) is to fill 25-50% of the hashtag stream associated with the event. This will optimize your position and your influence as well as increase your reach!
• Retweet, reply to and favorite messages from your influencers.
• Know to whom your tweet is visible. If you start your tweet with an @ mention, this tweet will only be visible to you, the user you mention, and only your followers who also follow that user. If you have text in front of the @ mention, that tweet will be visible to you, the user you mention, and all of your followers. Utilize this rule strategically. Not all of your followers will want to be inundated with every detail of every conversation. However, you want to let your followers know how accessible you are to answering questions, encouraging engagement, and continuing the conversation.

Effective live tweeting takes time, thought, and planning. But the most important thing to remember is to HAVE FUN showing off your brand.

Check back next week for why the after-event strategy is just as important as the before and during. If you’re curious in the meantime, read Mambo’s blogs on event lead nurturing and event outreach.

Good Luck, Nutcase!! We’ll be rooting you on here in Portland. To follow Nutcase for live updates at the event, tune into @nutcasehelmets or #phillybikeexpo and #hardcourtcourture.