Twitter is a great medium to promote and engage prospects for your in-person event, especially if you are tweeting it in real time. It generates instant attention and interaction on Twittersphere, and reaches out to people who are unable to attend your event. And that could be anyone in the world.

With the right use of hashtags and media – photos and videos – to complement your tweets, it can maximise the lifespan of your event. Once it’s out there, anyone who stumbles upon your hashtag can still view your tweets and its embedded media long after the event has ended.

On 4 August 2015, we were invited to live-tweet at the #digitalbootcamp event organised by Oracle in Singapore. The live-tweet was a success. We had the event hashtag trending in Singapore before lunchtime on the day itself, and it remained in the top ten all day.

Here’s how we did it:

1. Pre-event prep is crucial. Details provided by the organiser about the event, the speakers and their presentation topics, relevant Twitter handles and hashtags are helpful content to start with. From there, we planned our strategy, and set up some tweet templates to use on event day itself to save time.

2. Creating awareness takes time. With a short time to build an audience to follow our live-tweet before event day, we shared information on the event’s agenda and speakers to create interest on Twitter. This generated a lot of impressions and retweets. Cross-posting on LinkedIn also helped, along with post retweets by the organiser.

3. Tweeting requires craft. Twitter only allows 140 characters per tweet, and an embedded photo or video and links minimises this count. Bear in mind each tweet must also contain at least the organiser’s Twitter handle and event hashtag. With such limitation, we had to be clever with crafting our tweets, hashtagging relevant words to make the most of it.

4. Visuals get attention. Photos and videos drive engagement, aside from tweeting important points during a speaker’s presentation. It’s a glimpse of the event as it unfolds, and gives followers a ‘feel’ of being there.

5. Everything is time sensitive. Our challenge with the live-tweet wasn’t about the lack of content to tweet about. Rather, how fast we can post our tweets throughout. Tweeting videos was the most challenging. We had to film and edit the video, craft the tweet and upload it within a short timeframe.

6. Monitor what works, what doesn’t: We monitored our tweet analytics at the same time using Twitter Analytics and Keyhole. It measures what’s going on in real time so we can refine how we tweet as we go along.

7. Go with the flow. Strategy and planning can only go so far. We had to be realistic. Anything can happen during a live event coverage. Which meant being en pointe all the way, ready to roll with the punches whenever it comes.

For the event, we made over 200 tweets in a span of three days. It generated more than 16,000 organic impressions, 150 retweets and over 100 favourites from Twitter users who followed our account and the event hashtag.

So thanks to all for getting the hashtag trending in Singapore that day! We couldn’t have done it without you.