5 Tips To Help You Live Tweet A Speech

Live tweeting is quickly becoming a favorite way for news organizations to cover speeches and other events. It allows people at their desks in an office environment to follow an event without having to turn on a livestream or a TV. With college commencement season around the corner, here are some tips to help you live tweet like a pro! 1. Get An Advance Copy Of The Speech, If Possible (And In Digital Form) Your life will go from taking frantic dictation to simply copying, pasting and making minor revisions to the speech as it is delivered. Depending on how much time you have with the advance text, give it a glance, skim or read it and think of what parts of the speech would be good for Twitter. Which leads us to our next tip... 2. Don't Overwhelm People's Twitter Screens. Tweet Sparingly! Do not tweet every line out. Your followers will not be happy. You may also even lose followers! Instead, as the speech is being delivered (or ahead of time, if you have the advance text), think of what is most important from each section of the speech and choose that to tweet. This is precisely why journalists are good at live tweeting: they have the news judgement necessary to find what should and should not be tweeted. Limit yourself to a maximum of three tweets a minute. 3. Bring In Pictures And Other Voices If the event has a hashtag, make sure you have a column in TweetDeck, HootSuite or are using TweetChat to follow it. That way, you can retweet what other people are saying — something I highly recommend. Also, be sure to send some TwitPics during the event (or retweet people who are taking pictures in the room). Visuals are always good! 4. Have A Backup Method Of Tweeting Ready I like fancy Twitter apps, especially TweetDeck, but sometimes they don't work perfectly. Having a backup way to Tweet (I recommend plain old twitter.com) will ensure you don't miss a beat. Unfortunately, I can't help you if you start getting fail whales. 5. Throw In Links To A Livestream, If Available This is a great way to drive traffic to a livestream. If your live tweeting is that good, your followers will want to click this link to watch the speech live! Have any other tips? Share below. Happy tweeting! Special thanks to my friend Charlie Szold for suggesting this post idea!

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5 Tips To Help You Live Tweet A Speech

Ethan Klapper

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Ethan Klapper