Twitter and events – a natural fit
As a practitioner of social media tools and tactics, we’re often asked about the effectiveness of tools, like Twitter, in promoting technology companies. Approaches and tactics to using Twitter will naturally vary depending on what is being promoted; companies, news, products, content, or events. We’d like to share some recent success promoting a client at a trade show in Amsterdam and explain how one facet of this work can be measured with a new service called TweetReach.
Trade shows and other industry events are a natural fit for Twitter because of the “real time” element of the news from the show floor. Hashtags quickly form around events and a Darwinian process soon produces a winner; as well as a way for the more Twitter savvy participants and followers to view all event related tweets.
McBru actively leveraged social media promotion for the Integrated Systems Europe show in Amsterdam, Feb 2-4 on behalf of Biamp Systems, a Beaverton-based leader in networked media and AV equipment. The #ISE10 tag put up a fight before secumbing to the longer, yet stronger #ISA2010.
In addition to hustling on the show floor, we did windsprints on Twitter and other social media channels to amplify our client’s news far and wide. First, we were able to drive another few dozen people to a global webcast held in conjunction with the show — measured by number clicks on links in our tweets. Second, our activity generated 2,194 impressions on Twitter using the show hashtag. This translates to 2,194 opportunities for people to view our news who otherwise might not have. Impressions were tracked using TweetReach (http://tweetreach.com/), an interesting new web service that monitors the number of tweets and retweets generated on Twitter using a particular hashtag.
A savvy online media entity who ran the event’s blogger lounge claimed the top spot with the most event impressions at 50,811. But out of the 600+ exhibitors at the show, our client proudly made the “Twitter Top Ten” and was the first product vendor on the list. See the quick write-up here: http://www.dailydooh.com/archives/23229.
Twitter’s role in promoting events is sure to grow and evolve in the near future. Keep an eye out for this trend, or better yet, get tweeting and help shape it.