Stephen Nold

Nine Steps for Effective Twitter Lists use for Events and Exhibitions

Twitter has launched a “Lists” feature that allows users to create a list of people that others can follows. This is an interesting effort by Twitter to achieve some of the same functionality offered by LinkedIn Groups and provides a very nice way to categorize followers around content topics or any other way that you want to view groups of Twitter contacts.  

A new tab appears on your home page on the right-hand sidebar called “Lists” where you can create an easy way to sort followers. Prior to this feature, the inability to classify Twitter contacts diminished some of the social networking capabilities.   

Lists allow your contacts to follow your favorite Twitter users. This is a very significant feature as events seek to build their online communities.   Now association members can come to the event Twitter page and immediately join a large community of Event peers.

Unfortunately Twitter has yet designed a quick review and selection process that would allow quicker classification for current followers. The manual selection process greatly reduces the efficiency of creating a large List from current followers.

With the goal to launch your own event social media effort, here are 9 very simple steps to integrate the new Twitter Lists feature into your event.

1. Define your social media plan. This may be just a simple guideline for the messages that you intend to communicate. Think about frequency and relevancy to your community. This plan should incorporate all social media considerations and platforms including Facebook pages and LinkedIn Groups.
2. Define and use your Twitter event hash tag. While this task is important for all events, until there is a better way to register and protect your hash tag, don’t get to protective. Try to keep your conversation as the dominant thread if you find additional users. You can learn more about hashtags at the Twitter hashtag wiki. (http://twitter.pbworks.com/Hashtags)
3. Cross reference your Twitter community with other online groups and encourage participation in all communities.
4. Connect your brand to all relevant Social Media communities through simple announcements and registrations.
5. Don’t stop with just one Twitter page if you can generate relevant messages for sub groups within your followers. For example, the Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau has five different Twitter groups – each feed relevant messages to a specific industry customer.
6. On your registration page, provide a linked for registrants to connect on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
7. Manually or automatically populate your Twitter List directly from registration!
8. Invite key thought leaders and bloggers to Twitter or blog about your event.
9. Stimulate the conversation by asking questions. Don’t turn your Twitter feed into a one-sided conversation if you really are trying to create conversations.

As Twitter contends to invite 3^rd party software providers to build on their platform, the next generation of event and exhibition suppliers will build some great ways to interact with these communities from the show floor.   Already there are several suppliers building tools that will automate the process to connect your registration page and utilize the Twitter List API to auto-populate your list directly from registration.

In addition, you could use these tools to inform registrants which of their Twitter and Facebook friends or followers are (a) also registered and (b) already a member of the Twitter List or Facebook.  Unfortunately to date, LinkedIn has not supported an open platform that would allow 3^rd party software connectivity.

NOTE: On November 23, 2009, LinkedIn announced that the LinkedIn Platform was open for business and that developers worldwide could integrate LinkedIn into their business applications and Web sites.

Posted by Stephen Nold on November 28, 2009 | Comments (3)