The art of live-tweeting: Reporting and curating the best from live events

The thought of live-tweeting conjures extreme scenarios:

• Scenario #1: People tweeting incessantly about every moment of the fun they’re having at SXSW or other major event while you’re slogging away at the daily grind.
• Scenario #2: Revolutionaries risking their lives to send videos, photos, and updates from the front line of uprisings such as #jan25 or #iranelection.

There is, however, a middle ground. Live-tweeting can be a useful tool to share information from seminars and events to your followers. It’s also a great way to connect with savvy tweeters.

Before you start, know your audience. What do your followers respond to? What types of information are they interested in? Would they care about the event? If you have a diverse group of followers, you might warn them that a flurry of live tweets may soon flood their timelines. You might also consider setting up a separate account for the stream.

Once at the event, learn the hashtag — or create one — and use it in every tweet.

Be judicious. Don’t tweet every minute detail; find the significant insights and quotations. You are the journalist on the scene: Distill the talks into key points, and offer those to your followers. Ask yourself before sending the tweet: Would anyone care about this?

Pay attention to retweets and favorites. Did your first tweets spark reactions? Retweets and favorites are forms of engagement, ways that the Twitterverse acknowledges value. Use these initial interactions to help guide future tweets.

When you tweet a speaker, make sure to use his/her Twitter handle. That way, the person can find your comments after the talk when he or she checks @mentions on Twitter.

Case study: #ISOJ

Last month, I attended the International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin, Texas, which featured an impressive array of speakers from the world of online journalism. Each panel brought insight after insight, and I found myself eager to share the information in real time.

Before #isoj, I’d typically post a tweet or two from lively events, but I tended not to go crazy for fear of annoying my followers.

But I discovered something as I began tweeting. Followers and nonfollowers began retweeting my posts.

I began connecting with a wide range of people at the conference through Twitter because of my live-tweeting. One of the conference organizers included me on list of #isoj tweeters.

I found a host of interesting new tweeps to follow, some of whom began following me as I tweeted. And I was included in roundups of #isoj coverage.

The biggest surprise: I didn’t lose any followers. I actually gained 50 by the end of the conference, many of whom have become important connections for me since.

A well-curated live-tweeting session can expand your professional network greatly. Just make sure you apply a journalistic sensibility to your work. Your followers probably don’t care about what you had for lunch, but they might be quite interested in the latest insight from former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller.

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Related posts:

1. Curating The Future
2. To Tweet or Not To Tweet?
3. Tweeting your WordPress just got easier
4. Twitter favorites: Pesky little stars with multiple meanings
5. The rule of engagement: Be authentic