Tips for Live Tweeting

Candice Venters | @CandiceVenters Live tweeting can be a great way to inform and entertain your Twitter followers while remaining relevant within your industry. It can be a successful task, or it can be an irritating one. Preparing yourself for a live tweeting session will increase your chances of having fun and providing your audience with insightful and useful information. Here are a few tips on what to do and what to avoid:

Do’s:

Always give credit where credit is due. If you’re going to tweet someone else’s words or ideas, use quotations along with their Twitter handle and follow them. Not only are you avoiding any plagiarism issues, but it will give you an opportunity to network and stay in touch with the speakers.

Be Visual. If it is an event that you can take pictures at, share some photos during your live tweeting session. Photos are more appealing and will lure people in. Sometimes it’s more effective to mix it up with a graphic or chart in your tweet.

Engage as well as inform. It is important to tweet the information presented to you during the event, but it is also important to tweet content that will encourage engagement and interaction. You can do this by asking questions, using hashtags, retweeting tweets from other people at the event, answering other people’s questions, and mentioning other Twitter handles in your tweets.

Don’ts: 

Don’t tweet information that will only make sense to the people attending the event. The purpose of live tweeting is to give people who are not at the event an idea of what is going on and what is being said. For example, tweeting “I agree with what John Smith said,” will only make sense if you were there. Instead, tweet “I agree with John Smith’s statement to allocate more funding to education.”

Don’t overcrowd your followers Twitter feed with tweets. In this case, quality is more valuable than quantity. Because it is live, you will be tweeting a lot of information. However, don’t feel obligated to tweet something just for the sake of tweeting. Listen to what’s being said, and tweet the key messages that you find interesting.

Don’t come unprepared. Before you start live tweeting, make sure you let your followers know what you will be doing ahead of time, and include the who, what, where, and when. When you do this, include the correct Twitter handles and hashtags. You don’t want to be left scrambling to find out what the speakers Twitter handle is after the event starts. It can go by pretty fast and you don’t want to be overwhelmed and relay the wrong information.

Follow these tips and you will be live tweeting in no time! Have fun with it and don't be afraid to be creative.