How to use Twitter to further your event, work or career

Twitter is here to stay. I used to think it was ridiculous to try to encapsulate your thoughts in just 140 characters. But the reality is that it is much more than that - although there is an art form to writing with such brevity!

Twitter use drives a lot of traffic to my little personal blog and helps boost it to more than a thousand views a week. So there's no reason it won't do similar for more professional web content promoting a program, event or a business.

Auto-posting blog articles to Twitter helps too, but you have to be creative in the way you title your blog posts so they make for an enticing tweet. I will often also embed Twitter tricks like user names and hashtags in the title, post the article so it generates the referring tweet, then immediately edit the title to remove the Twitter artefacts to make it presentable for other audiences. Interestingly, hashtags are now becoming common in Google+ posts.

Another thing to consider:


If you're organising an event/forum/conference/campaign, make sure you choose a good hashtag and then tell everyone about it. A hashtag needs to be pretty short (to allow space for everyone tweeting about your thing), not already being used for something else (much embarrassment can ensue from that issue!), and advised well in advance so people don't start using something else and end up tweeting with multiple hashtags.

I've been surprised at the number of community forums and the like I've been at during the ACT election campaign where no consideration was given to harnessing Twitter. When you have a third of your audience with their heads down tweeting as you are presenting, you want to make sure they're all connecting with each other surely?

At the recent ACT Greens campaign launch, I asked Shane Rattenbury who was MCing to advise the tag #ACTGreens2012 at the start. By the end of that one-hour event, there were 76 tweets using it, including a lot of retweets. At 200-600 average followers each person posting, there would have been several thousand people saw those tweets of highlights of the launch, links to a funny video ad, and photos. So immediately the launch audience went from a hundred or so people to several thousand, all way before it got near any mainstream media coverage (which was also pretty good).

This article from the University of Adelaide gives a good summary of a number of other key points to keep in mind for new (and old!) Twitter users. (Link via @sumenrai)

You can find me on Twitter @AshleyInTheory