[SIDEBAR]
A little bird told me that it couldn't be easier to get started on Twitter, and it's a wonderful way to broadcast your events, network with others and share what you're up to in the meetings industry. Here are a handful of quick tips for making the most of this growingly popular social networking platform.
- Have an end-goal in mind, even if it's just a general one, which will help shape the future of your tweeting efforts as you build a following. Are you trying to drive attendance for a particular event? Network with as many peers as possible? Build massive traffic to your website? Decide ahead of time, before you paint yourself into a corner by building a poorly targeted following.
- Tweeting isn't a one-way street. Don't just broadcast yourself on Twitter, make sure to interact, follow others, search for interesting news and so forth. By actively participating you'll engage more followers, discover news briefs that often scoop mainstream outlets, and be seen as industry-focused rather than just self-promotional.
- Skip the 'trivial' pursuits. It's great to share a personal insight or interesting experience now and then, but make sure your posts avoid meaningless updates like, "Just got home from the trip to Atlanta and boy am I tired." Tweeting just for the sake of tweeting will soon lead to your posts being bypassed for ones with actual useful or compelling info.
- Use a tracking platform such as bit.ly, which will let you see how much interest your tweets are garnering—and what kinds of info and topics are best-received by your followers. These tools usually help substantially in the shortening of the URL you're tweeting too, providing you more leeway to get your message across within the 140-character limit.
- Consider including a specific question or "call to action" now and then to draw more attention to a Tweet and its adjoining link. A post such as "The ABC Conference should be interesting this year" normally won't be as effective as either "Check out the new doings at this year's ABC Conference!" or even "Have you heard about the excellent speaking roster at the 2011 ABC Conference?"