How to live-tweet at events

For attendees and organisers, live-tweeting is common at most conferences, events, webinars and lectures. And to capitalise on it, many event organisers have figured out they need to assign a person or even a team to run Twitter at their events so it runs smoothly.

Do you think about live-tweeting? Whether you've done it before or this is your first time, we have gathered some tips, tricks, and best practices below.

Pre the event, three tips

• You can create templates ahead of time. For example, if the event has speakers, make images of these speakers pre the event. Then, optimise them for tweets (876 x 438 pixels) and leave some whitespace to add text later. Also, create templates for quotes. You can use a photo editor application for this or a web service like Canva, which lets you create templates, change text, and export web images without any design skills.
• If you don't know precisely what time some things are happening, you can still write tweets ahead of time and put them into notes or similar. That way, you can grab it at a moment's notice. If you choose to do this, shorten any links and check the character count so you can copy, paste, and send.
• Research the event's projected hashtag and related, impactful hashtags to be used during the event.
• Expect technical difficulties and have a backup plan. Ensure your devices are fully charged, carry your phone charger around, and keep a laptop handy as a backup. Invest in a battery case if you're concerned about battery life and your ability to charge on the go.

During the event, ten tips

• Use the event's hashtag in every single live tweet. Make sure each of your tweets leaves room for that hashtag. When faced with cutting the hashtag or shortening the tweet's copy, shrink the tweet's copy.
• Interact with your Twitter audience. Keep track of the official and unofficial hashtags that may have popped up. Of course, you won't be able to see every tweet, but please be sure to look out for questions you can answer, positive comments you can respond to (or like, or retweet), and negative feedback you can address.
• Ask your Twitter audience questions to boost engagement and give insights, like "What's been your favourite session so far?" 
• Could you include speakers' Twitter handles when quoting them? Could you let your speakers know you're tweeting about them by having their Twitter handle when you promote or quote their sessions?
• Get a good seat at speaker sessions. If you're live-tweeting photos, ensure the images are taken from a unique and good angle. It would be good to arrive early at the sessions you want to tweet about. You want everyone to retweet your photos.
• Have quick photo editing apps on hand. And make sure you're familiar with the photo editing apps you plan to use beforehand.
• Use the templates you prepared pre the event. Have these templates on hand as you listen to the speakers. When you hear a tweetable takeaway from a speaker, type it up in the picture template, write a quick tweet to accompany it (including the speaker's Twitter handle and your event's official hashtag), check quickly for spelling errors, and ship that tweet as soon as you can.
• The first tweet with any given quote is often the most retweeted, so you must do this fast. 
• Take photos if you see anything particularly tweet-worthy; get ready to snap a picture and upload it to Twitter. 
• If you're using Instagram to snap pictures at the event, ensure you upload the image directly to Twitter, not using Instagram's "share to Twitter" feature. By uploading photos directly to Twitter, your tweets will automatically appear in your followers' streams, affecting your tweets' performance.

Post the event, four tips

• Compile the best tweets from all sessions. Then, write a follow-up blog post with all the best tweets from the session. Ensure the tweets feature a healthy mixture of your and your attendees' tweets. 
• Please keep in touch with your Twitter audience. Chances are, people will still be tweeting about the event when it's over. They might have questions about where to find session recordings or tweet feedback about how they think it went. Respond to these tweets, both positive and negative.
• Could you assess engagement on each of your tweets? Which of your tweets got the most likes and retweets? Which links were clicked on the most? Were tweets with images more popular than tweets without images? Could you take a look at which tweets performed best to improve your next live-tweeting session?
• Say thank you to everyone that you now interact with on your Twitter.

What other live-tweeting tips do you have? Feel free to share in the comments below!