1. LET'S HAVE APARTY 12 Steps to a Great Twitter Event

2. 1. CHOOSEA TOPIC 3. Topics should be relevant to yourstakeholders. Doing this is actuallyharder than it looks, because it involvesmaking sure that your partners are onboard and that the topic serves theirinterests as well as yours.An interesting topic should be one thatwill get conversation going among yourpartners, your followers, and your ownteam. 4. 2. DEFINEGOALS 5. Establish Benchmarks. If youre goingto be devoting labor hours to aTwitter Party, you need to measureperformance. Performance can bemeasured in social shares, websitehits and conversions, or othermetrics.Your first few Twitter Parties willestablish your baseline metrics. 6. 3. CREATE AHASHTAG 7. ## Here youll need to do some keywordresearch. Stop by storify.com and performsome research on prior tweet chats andTwitter Parties that have used the hashtag.It might seem to be a no-brainer to use ahashtag based on the clients product, butthats not always the case. Sometimescornering a unique and creative hashtagcan help in the promotion of the event.### ##### 8. LANDING 4. CREATE APAGE 9. Do this sooner than later,because you want to be able todirect traffic to your destinationsite as soon as you can. Yourlanding page should fulfill theprimary purpose of the party, beit lead generation, direct sales, e-mailsignups, or other action. Yourlanding page should be correctlylaid out for usability and itscontent should be optimized forSEO. Once you have it ready, youcan set the date of your eventand start to point people towardsthe page. 10. 5. GATHERINFLUENCERS 11. Outreach is vital, and so is selecting a partner who canprovide great content and thought leadership for yourbrand. Your partner should also be someone who yourfollowers will be excited in hearing from. Your influencerdoesn't always have to come from outside.By creating an event where your influencerpresents valuable content to your audience,everyone benefits: your influencers position asa thought leader rises, you have opportunitiesfor direct lead generation and brand exposurefor your business, and your followers geteducation and help with their interests. Its awin-win for everyone. 12. 6.MOBILIZEVOLUNTEERS 13. You may already have a corps of volunteersas part of your social media following. Makeuse of this! While you should not abuse thistrust, carefully activating leaders within yourfan community to promote upcoming eventsis a must. 14. Tools such as Inkybee and Grouphigh can be used toquickly research Blogs and Bloggers that haveaudiences that are relevant to the topic of yourTwitter party. Most pro bloggers will respond to paidsponsorships, but these can be as simple as gift cardgiveaways that can be easily arranged if you areworking with a large brand.Deep discounts and ongoing special offers for thefollowers of relevant blogs can aso be arranged. Theusual arrangement is for a cash or gift cardrenumeration in exchange for an announcedsponsorship consisting of a 400 to 600 word blogpost, along with mutual social channel support anddirect participating in the event. 15. 7. PROVIDECONTENTTHAT PARTNERS CAN SHARE 16. Of course, leading up to the event youshould provide your partners with socialmedia visual collateral that can beshared on multiple platforms. Eventhough its a twitter party, theres noreason you cant let folks on G+,Facebook and elsewhere know about it.We like to have a timewindow of about two weeks,and like to have around 3 to 5images provided to partnersto share on their socialchannels. 17. 8.CREATESCRIPT 18. Generally, scripts in Twitter Parties follow aquestion and answer format. Usually, a Twitterparty is between 1 and 2 hours, with each questionand answer !exchange taking between 10 and 20minutes. Questions are usually asked by the host,who is your primary influencer. Sometimes,questions will be phrased as a question to theaudience, and then the influencer will present theirtake, and take responses from the Twitter audience.! !! ! !!! 19. 9.REHEARSE 20. Its helpful to do a run through of the script over the phone orSkype before the event. At the event itself, you and your staffshould be present as helpers.Keep track of everyone who asks a question.Your influencer probably wont beable to get to everyone directly, butits important to make everyone whodirectly participates feel valued.Make sure you're set up to record atranscript of your event using Storify,for later content harvesting andoutreach.The idea is to buildmomentum andexcitement and tostart viral discussionduring the event. 21. 10.PROMOTE 22. Pre-Party promotion is key to success.Make sure to work closely with your partner for planned co-promotion.Exchange social media collateral and retweeteach other concerning the event. Be soft in the promotion ofyour event and always weave any mentions with relevantpoint you are making in the conversation you are in. Considersponsored stories and tweets if your budget allows.Write a press release. Usually, timing of about a weekbefore the event will give you good SEO lift and agood increase in website traffic. 23. 11.RUN THEEVENT 24. As your influencers follow the script, make sure to jump in withquestions and answers to assist the hosts, deal with anytroublemakers, and to steer activity and questions towards yourlanding page, which should be the ultimate goal. Tools likeTweetchat.com are great for monitoring live Twitter Parties.Make sure to retweet,mention smart repliesand remarks by eventparticipants, and makeboth your influencerand the participantsfeel valued.The big day is here! 25. 12. EVALUATE&IMPROVE 26. Check your analytics.Did you hit your benchmarks?How can you make up for thatweakness in your next event?What keyword frequencyshowed up the most?At what times during the eventdid you see the most traffic?What were the peaks in trafficduring the event lead up asopposed to the event itself?What did partners andshareholders think of theevent? 27. Build relationships for the next event. One of the greatthings about Twitter Parties is that they are parties. Twitterparties are great opportunities for your partners and youraudience to connect and network.Finally, don't forget to send heartfelt thank youemails to your partners for participating in theevent, thank new contacts for their participating,and thank your audience for being part of it. 28. ABOUT USA digital marketing leader since 1996, Didit providesfull-service online advertising and marketing serviceswith award-winning expertise and innovation.Didit is among the nation's fastest-growing technologyfirms; it was named to Deloitte 2007 and 2008Technology Fast 500 as well as the Inc. 500 for both2007 and 2008.