13 Twitter Tools for Event Management

On today’s show we discuss Twitter tools for event management to get more out of Twitter.com

Before you get started please try and treat Twitter like you are entering a cocktail party. You don”t walk into a cocktail party and start blurting about how cool you are or showing off the things you are working on. If you can wait until someone asks about you, you will get a lot more from Twitter.

Here are four things to keep in mind when using Twitter (or a cocktail party):
1) Listen to others first.
2) Have conversations.
3) Support others. Help your followers out as much as you can.
4) Introductions. Introduce and connect others.

13 Twitter Tools for event management or event management companies

TweetDeck Is a great desktop or mobile client to keep track of your people. It has an easy to use interface with columns, timed tweets, analytics, and much more.
HootSuite Similar to Tweetdeck and very popular for desktop tweeting. Most power users use either Hootsuite or Tweetdeck.
Twitter For iPhone & iPad A very useful interface for your mobile devices. It has a great new option of lists to keep track of your favorite twitterers.
SocialOomph Automatically follows people that follow you. Can get you a bunch of spam but when used with Manageflitter (see below) it can be quite useful.
Klout.com Check your twitter influence online. Compare yourself with others and try to increase your influence by using the stats Klout provides.
BlastFollow A great way to follow your conference attendees who are on twitter. Plug in your conference hashtag and start following your audience. Great way to start listening.
Twiangulate Put three different followers and find out who they are all following. Great way to dig deep into twitter and make it useful for you. Think how you can find new clients, follow competitors, find other like minded people.
ManageFlitter Great way to keep track of which of your followers are using or not using twitter. I unfollowed 900 people last week. Purge them in one visit. Plus see who is tweeting the most- start conversations with them.
Bit.ly Great way to get analytics on your tweets and links you are sharing. Gret way to shorten links, manage them and get information.
TweetReach Want to see how far your tweets go. Check out TweetReach to find the exposure you are getting from the service.
I get asked all the time how we can set up Twitter plasmas around the meetings we produce. Or how we can project the stream behind the speakers or panels. here are three great ones:
TwitterFall
Tweetchat
StreamTwitter

Transcripts!!!

13 Twitter Tools for Event Management – Show 148

Mike McAllen: This is Mike McAllen with Meetings Podcast. I wanted to thank you again for tuning in and we’re very excited because today’s Podcast is brought to you by Audible.com. You can get a free audio book download at www.audiblepodcast.com/meetingspodcast and there’s over 7500 titles to choose from and you can listen to them on your iPod or your MP3 player and we’re very excited. So check that out and I think you’ll really enjoy Audible, I know I do.

Unknown: Welcome to the Meetings Podcast: The Meeting Planner’s podcast source for what’s new in the meetings and events industry! Meetings Podcast is a conversation with a variety of voices that looks at events, meetings, and media, and the changing world around them.

Mike McAllen: Welcome back to the Meetings Podcast. This is Mike McAllen with Grass Shack Events and Media, and of course, Meetings Podcast. This morning, I’m going to do a little Twitter talking and talk about Twitter. One big thing about Twitter I’ve said it maybe 8 million times is you should treat Twitter like a cocktail party. When you walk into a cocktail party, you just don’t start blurting out stuff, you kind of sit back. You listen, you introduce yourself, you start a conversation and that comes to my first Twitter tip.

Actually, there are four tips. Treat it like cocktail party that’s not the tip that’s what it’s called. You want to listen. You want to have conversations on Twitter. You don’t just want to blurt stuff out. You want to ask questions about other people, answer other people’s questions. Number three is supporting. You want to help your people. Your people are on Twitter. Your followers, you want to try help them as much as possible that always gains friends and help other people and the last one number four, you want to introduce people. When you go to a cocktail party if you know somebody on that group, you’re going to introduce them around so that’s my four cocktail party Twitter tips and then let’s get on to the rest.

Okay. I have a bunch of very cool Twitter things, not things but applications you can use to enhance your Twitter to make a Twitter work for you and make it something you just don’t talk about what you had for breakfast. So first of all, let’s start with events. Let’s say you know I get ask this question all the time, how are we going to project the Twitter stream around the conference or the media that we’re doing, great way to project. Obviously, you just need a projection system so a computer with a plasma attached and an internet connection.

And here are three quick applications you can use, one is called Twitterfall, very cool one. Put in a hash tag if you have a hash tag for your event which you should. You throw that in there and the Twitterfall it will just start falling down the tweets that are coming. TweetChat, one that I used for when I go on event props for meeting professionals or event professionals on Twitter. You can go into TweetChat and look in for hash tag so let’s say it’s for event props, I would put event props in there and that’s all on the TweetChat page in my browser that’s all it would show me or people that are tweeting that hash tag. It can be a little annoying for other people if they are watching your Twitter stream at that time because you’ll just be like answering questions and talking to other people, so it’s kind of an interesting one but another great one for projection up on the screen. Stream Twitter is the third and last one. It’s another application that you can use, it’s called Stream Twitter. I’ll check that one out.

Let’s get into how to keep track of your Twitter followers. Twitter has introduced Twitter list which is very cool and you can follow other people’s list. I didn’t really made a lot of list but I followed other people’s list, so if you go into Twitter.com when you’re logged in and check out list or look into other people’s profiles. Some other people you maybe really interested in, check out their profiles and see what list they are either following or they have their own and that will just pick up people that are tweeting up about, the stuff that you maybe interested in.

For your desktop or your iPhone or your mobile device, there’s a couple of really good ones that you can keep track of your Tweeples, your Twitter peeps. One is called TweetDeck, it’s the one I used. It has columns. It has a search feature. You can time tweets and you can put in your Bit.ly number in there which we’ll talk about Bit.ly a little bit, not your Bit.ly number but your Bit.ly account and some other ones. I think there I’m blank, you know, the names of other ones but TweetDeck is very good to keep track of people. They have columns. You can do searches and then have a search column and it’s very easy to view. It’s laid out in a really great way.

[0:05:00] Another one just like TweetDeck, the second one is HootSuite. HootSuite is just like TweetDeck. I haven’t really used it because I just got started on TweetDeck and I really like TweetDeck so I never made the move but I have several friends that just use HootSuite and they love it. So again, check those out and keep track of your Twitter people.

On the iPod or iPhone, the Twitter app has worked really good for me. I’m sorry I don’t have android but I heard also that people enjoy the Twitter app. It’s really well done. Again, it has the list. It really rocks so if you have an iPod or an iPhone, another great one you can use is the Twitter app.

Let’s talk about your followers, let’s say you want to get followers. You went there several different ways of kind of looking at the analytics of your Twitter tweets or of your Twitter page, a lot of different ways of getting more followers, a lot of great ways to manage followers and here’s a couple of them. Social Omp, it automatically follows back anyone who follows you which can be handy and you know who’s following you, you’re following them, the conversation starts right away. It can get kind of spammy so I’d be careful with it.

But there are some other tools that you can use like ManageFlitter which I just dumped 900 followers last week when I’ve found this ManageFlitter.com. And it tells you who hasn’t tweeted in like a year and so you can just dump them or they’re obviously not using the service and then you can see who’s using it a lot, who isn’t so that’s a really cool one that goes with the Social Omp. So if you use Social Omp and you’re following back people who were following you, you could also manage them with ManageFlitter.com so look into those two.

Another one that’s getting very popular is Cloud.com. Actually when I was at BlogWorld last week, I went to the Cloud party, very nice people those Clouders. You know, Cloud shows your influence online and people are using it more and more which I don’t know if it’s really that great but it is interesting to go look in and see what your influence is according to your Cloud score.

BlastFollow, this is a very cool one if you do attend a conference that you really like and you want to follow those people that were at the conference, you just throw in the hash tag and it will follow all those people that are using that hash tag right away.

So that was BlastFollow, now moving on Twiangulate. Twiangulate is a very cool one if you want to start really getting the depth with your Twitter. What you can do is you could put in three different Twitter users and look for commonalities between the three and then follow those people. So think about putting it in maybe your competitors in there, people that you know your competitors and look who they’re all following and maybe follow those people too. Again, to find clients, to see what’s going on with these other people, so competitors clients, really cool kind of thing if you want to get down deep into your Twitter and really use it so that was called Twiangulate.

I talked a little bit about this before, it’s called Bit.ly. I really enjoyed Bit.ly because sometimes I will put some post, well let me tell you what it does first. So Bit.ly gives you your own URL so if you have a URL, you’re passing on some sort of information that you’re sending your Twitter people or actually your blog people if you want to use your Bit.ly URL. You take the URL that you’re sending them to and you stick it in the Bit.ly and it generates a smaller URL plus it will then keep track of that URL and see how many people opened it. Very interesting if you’re looking for analytics, if you have to show your social media stats to someone to show some sort of ROI on the investment time that you’re putting in plus for me, I don’t have to show that to anyone but I like to follow it and see what people are really clicking on. So if you’re doing blog post to besides using your Twitter or you want your Twitter audience to really be interested in your tweets, take a look at what stuff you’re tweeting out and what they’re following so you can really kind of gauge that as a good way.

Another one that you can use just like Bit.ly is called TweetRich. TweetRich, you can see basically how far your tweet goes. It kind of analyzes your tweet for exposure. Another kind of a cool thing that you can look into if you want to research your tweets and actually do some kind of your own kind of analytics on what people are interested in, how you’re sending people to your own website to do a little marketing maybe for your event or your meeting. So those are some cool things, TweetRich.

[0:10:00] So that’s about it. I want to keep this short because I know that I listen to a couple of the podcast on a long drive yesterday and I can be kind of wordy when I’m not prepared. So I was a little prepared today and I really want to thank you all for listening. I will have links to all of these Twitter tools on the Meetings Podcast page, so check that out at meetingspodcast.com. And if you can think of any other very cool Twitter tools that I could add to this, I’d really appreciate that. I know that all the listeners would appreciate it and that’s it. Thank you or listening.

Please send in your questions and comments to meetingspodcast@gmail.com. You can always call me on my cell phone, 925-699-3190. You can find me at grassshackroad.com if you want to hire us to your production for your meetings or to do a video, we’re always here for you. So I will talk to you later. Thank you. Bye, bye!

Unknown: We appreciate and thank you for listening to the Meetings Podcast. Please e?mail with any questions or comments to meetingspodcast@gmail.com. The Meetings Podcast theme music comes from the Delgado Brothers, which can be found at DelgadoBrothers.com. Special thanks to Riptide Graphics for graphics and audio editing of this podcast.

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