@WriterChanelle

Social media is a burgeoning industry, and small businesses, especially, are clamoring to study from those who have become well-versed in the language and art of the status update. When it comes to conferences, one of the best methods to garner publicity is to enable participants to live-tweet the presentations.
Akin to Twitter chats, live tweets from a conference enable those who were unable to attend to follow the conference, retweet information they find valuable, and spread interest for your event throughout the social media sphere.

Small Business Event Marketing

The Grow Smart Business conference is a success story because Network Solutions and the Washington Business Journal brought together so many great elements that 392* contributors had no trouble tweeting its value. 81% of #growsmartbiz mentions came on the day of the conference due to attendees who arrived smart phone, laptop, and iPad equipped to take advantage of the Wi-Fi services offered. *at the time of writing this post

This image from What The Hashtag, a site that allows visitors to see the popularity of hashtags being discussed on Twitter, shows the contributors who tweeted the most and how many mentions #growsmartbiz received over a 7 day period.

Two full days after the conference, #growsmartbiz was still buzzing on the web.
Social Mention is an analysis tool that searches the social web for mentions of your brand.

#growsmartbiz

Attendees clearly had a strongly positive feeling about the conference overall.

To illustrate the significance of these figures, I did a search on Justin Bieber, who is so popular Twitter has dedicated servers just to handle the number of mentions he garners every second.

Justin Bieber

The positive sentiment for the #growsmartbiz conference is nine times higher than the sentiment for Justin Bieber. Both the strength and reach of Bieber in social media was only twice as high as that of the conference held by Network Solutions. As expected, the community of brand advocates is higher for the pop star, which results in a lower passion percentage.

Would you rather have more people talking about you, or more people talking about you in a positive fashion?

Risk and Reward Analysis

The warnings came ahead of the start of the conference:

The pros far outweigh the cons with respect to live-tweeting events, the cons being those people who will unfollow you for filling their timeline with what they deem invaluable tweets.

People who tweet often through Twitter chats and/or live events are an asset to a company seeking word of mouth advertising because they know what is valuable to their community; they know what is more or less likely to get retweeted and spread.

Getting the most out of the conference

• Become a brand Ambassador: If you’re looking for a way to leverage your time spent at a conference, consider offering your services as an ambassador to a company in need in exchange for a pass to the conference.
• Write a blog post about the Conference: Offer to write a blog post before the conference, building buzz for the speakers and the sponsoring company by using your knowledge of search engine optimization strategy.
• Tweet good stuff: Curate your tweets during the conference to maximize the benefit to your followers. Since you will likely miss some good content, between writing your own tweets, follow the conference stream and retweet other attendees. They will take notice, which can serve as an icebreaker if you haven’t met the person yet. “
• Ask good questions: Establish yourself as knowledgeable in your industry by asking well-informed questions.
• Get friendly: Get future business by stepping away from the keyboard and introducing yourself to attendees. Beware of selling yourself too much, though. Inauthenticity is not welcome when networking.

Your experience as an attendee at a conference is what you make it, so make it good and get a gig!