Using twitter walls at events

When your organizing an event, your audience will discuss the event on social media. You can facilitate this by providing places on the web for this. In this article you can find some pointers for how to use twitter during an event.

In preparation:

1. Make sure the audience members are able to find each other on the web. Clearly communicate a short hashtag they can use on twitter.
2. Start a twitter account for the conference and use it to give away information about speakers etc. Give frequent updates, one update each workday will do.
3. You might want to add a twitter widget to your event website. Personally I prefer to just mention the twitter account and the hashtag on the event website. Twitter widgets for your website can be found on the twitter widget website
4. If your hosting a conference ask the speakers to post a twittermessage with the hashtag of the conference
5. Follow the twitter messages of the speakers and retweet messages that are interesting for the audience of the conference.
6. Make sure you give timely answers when asked  a question on twitter.

During the event:

1. Show to the visitors of the event that twitter is being used. Show the twitter backchannel on a screen in the conference room.
2. Choose the place where you visualize the backchannel wisely. Showing it at the main stage near one of the speakers can cause problems. What will happen if the audience is not happy with the speaker? A place more near the sides of the conference room is better suited.
3. Participants of the event tend to take a lot of pictures during the event, make sure you choose a twitter wall that also shows pictures.
4. Choose a twitter backchannel that shows tweets in a clear and readable way. Cool effects and many tweets are nice on your own computer, but hard to read when only glanced at every now and then.
5. At some events you might need a moderation tool to weed out offensive tweets. This however is mainly a problem at large events. For smaller events the costs are bigger than the benefits.
6. Use twitter to communicate last minute changes to the program.