Twitter can be powerful at generating event sign ups or enquiries. I wanted to share with you some ingenious ways to give your Twitter efforts a little boost.
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Have you ever wondered which of your tweets was getting the most attention or traction with your audience?
I bet a few of you have even signed up for expensive tools which help you track that sort of thing?
I’ve got some good news for you that might save you that monthly subscription.
Twitter have a great series of tools they’ve created for their advertisers. These help assess how successful paid twitter adverts are performing. You can get access to these tools even if you don’t have a budget for Twitter Advertising.
Set up all your details as-if you were going to run a campaign at but never put the campaign live. You’ll still have access to those great tools which help you understand what tweets are working, and which aren’t.
Use FollowerWonk to Cross Reference Your Competitors Followers
FollowerWonk is a paid-for tool. Yet its free account still gives you an exceptional amount of insight about an industry or topic of interest for no cost.
I’m going to take you through the way I’d use FollowerWonk when launching a conference. This is exactly what I did a couple of weeks ago for an upcoming event.
First I’ve tapped into my personal network. I asked them for who they think is the most influential person covering that topic on Twitter. I’ll use a tool like Klout or maybe their follower count to decide on my top three.
I can then use Followerwonk to look at who all three of these influencers follow. These are key people in the industry and good people to approach about speaking at the event.
I then look at people who follow all three of my influencers, these are the people I might want to attend my event. With these people either I follow them or add them to a secret list on Twitter where I’ve marked them as people I’d like to attend my event.
Use BlueNod to Find Influential Twitter Users
If you’re lucky enough to work in the community where people use a hashtags BlueNod can be a killer tool. It will help you find influential Twitter users.
One of the areas I run events, people conveniently add #measure to the end of a lot of their tweets.
As an event manager, you might use #eventprofs.
Popping these into BlueNod visualises the network of people using that hashtag so you can see who is at the centre of that network.
If you want to be more cheeky you can pop in the hashtag of a competitors event. This will work out which of their attendees you want to butter up to come along to your event and spread the word online.
Repeat Your Tweets for More Coverage
I don’t read all the tweets the people I follow write in a day and I’d be amazed if you did either.
The fact is we all dip in and dip out of Twitter.
This means even if you have a healthy number of followers on Twitter there’s no guarantee they are going to get to read your tweets.
This means you’ve got to be prepared to repeat yourself.
Some people just schedule the same tweet to go out many times. I’m not a big fan or this kind of approach. I’m much happier reworking a tweet to say a similar thing and then spreading those tweets out across the day.
Even during the night and weekends. This makes sure they get see by as many of my followers as I can.
Favourite Tweets for Compelling Testimonials
Testimonials are powerful. They act as proof that your event is top notch. However, getting people to sign off on testimonials can be tough. An approach we’ve used to great effect it to favourite positive things people say about our event while it’s taking place. Once the dust has settled and we start promoting the event again we can go through these favourites. We’ve got a list of potential ones to use as testimonials.
Twitter event have a handy embed tool. This allows you to pull in the photo and name of the person giving the positive mention making them even more impactful.
Get Users to Share Their Attendance with Their Network.
You have managed to get someone to hand over their details and book a ticket to your event. Now they’ve completed that process make it as easy as possible to share that with their network on Twitter.
Our event software does this for us. If you’ve got a custom ‘Thank You’ page make sure there’s the option for people to share their attendance on Twitter.
It will help them as they’ll be able to find out who they know already attending, and it will help you as they’re doing you marketing for you.
In Conclusion
Twitter can be hugely powerful in driving registrations for events and other goals for your business. You can increase the likelihood of that success by learning the tricks of the trade used by Twitter power users.
