If you’re a social media savvy event planner, you’ve probably learned a little about leveraging Twitter to market, track, and share your event but now that Twitter is changing the rules around the 140-character count, you can use Twitter to do even more. We looked into the upcoming changes to explain what’s new and how you can use it as an event planner and even as an event provider.
What’s New:
- Replies – In order to make conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, when you reply to a tweet, the names of the users you tag won’t count toward your 140-character count.
- No More “.@” – In the current version of twitter, if you want everyone to see your reply, you have to use “.@Username” (otherwise, the only people who will see an @ reply in their timeline [besides the sender and the recipient] are people who follow both the sender and recipient). This change means that everyone will see all your @replies.
- Retweet and Quote Your Own Posts – Have you noticed that you can’t retweet or quote your own posts? That’s about to change. Twitter plans to enable the Retweet button on your own tweets.
- Media Attachments – A picture says a thousand words, videos make us feel like we’re part of the action and we all love a good gif but Twitter’s character count usually prevents us from adding more than 1 or 2 pieces of media to back up what we have to say. Soon, this will no longer be an issue because Twitter will no longer count media attachments towards your 140-character count!
How to Leverage These Changes for Your Event:
Here are a few ways that you’ll be able to utilize Twitter for your event after these changes take place (please feel free to share any other ideas in the comments below):
Create Some FOMO – As an event planner, you already know the value of videos, photos, and gifs from past events or from your current event, they help create a sense of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) in potential attendees. Now you can share even more media to show non-attendees what they’re missing, and give them a reason to buy tickets to your next event – And still have space to link to your registration page.
Event providers can utilize this change by posting demonstration gifs and videos of their products, venue owners can share mini-tours of their spaces, and attendees can share even more about why they loved your event!
Shine a light on past successes – Now that twitter will allow users to Retweet their own content, you can re-share highlights from previous events. “Check out what @______ had to say about last year’s conference: [quote your previous testimonial tweet]” or retweet your event announcement from last week (just to be sure everyone saw it).
Event providers can retweet their most popular tweets about their products and venue owners can quote tweets from their previous events in order to demonstrate the versatility of their events space.
Carry-on With More Conversations – Since @ replies no longer count toward your 140-character count, you can tag as many users as you like. If you’re hosting a hybrid event and want to tag multiple people who asked the same question on Twitter (in order to make them all feel like they’re involved), now you can! Or if you’re hosting a panel and want to share the title of the panel, a link to the registration page, and tag each of the panelists, you’ll finally have space to do so!
Additionally, since you will no longer have to use the “.@” convention in order to share your @replies with everyone, you’ll also be able to demonstrate the responsiveness of your team when attendees, exhibitors, and customers have questions.
These changes in particular will provide you with more opportunities to better engage and connect with your audiences!
According to Twitter’s blog, “These updates will be available over the coming months,” but we’re already looking forward to them! While Twitter wouldn’t be Twitter without its 140-character limit, we are excited to have the ability do more with the platform. Do you have any ideas for leveraging these updates as an event professional? Share your thoughts in the comments section or send us a Tweet @MeetingPool. We love to hear from you!
Kaylynne Hatch
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It’s good for them to give its users more space to express themselves, but this news don’t impress when you compare Twitter to its peers Pump.io and GNUsocial, which do not have limits at all.
Still, Twitter is way more popular than the others.