Social Media: How To Get The Most Out Of Twitter For Events

Social Media:
How To Get The Most Out Of Twitter
To Make Your Event A Success.

amiando.com - September 2010

amiando.com – online event registration & ticketing

Table of Contents
Executive Summary ................................................................................................................................. 2
Why You Should Observe Your Audience ................................................................................................ 3
The Data Source: Twitter and Ten Events ................................................................................................ 3
Twitter ................................................................................................................................................. 3
The Events ........................................................................................................................................... 3
Analysis .................................................................................................................................................... 6
What We Wanted to Find Out ............................................................................................................. 6
General Statistics ................................................................................................................................. 6
Twitter Behavior at Events................................................................................................................... 7
Social Media and the Event Lifecycle .................................................................................................. 9
Social Media Power Users ................................................................................................................. 13
A Last Word: Applying these Findings to Other Social Media ............................................................... 14
The Authors ........................................................................................................................................... 15
About amiando – event registration & ticketing ................................................................................... 15

Social Media: How To Get The Most Out Of Twitter To Make Your Event A Success 1


Executive Summary

With the knowledge of more than 100,000 events worldwide that use amiando.com for
online event registration, ticketing and Social Media marketing we thought it was about
time to dig deeper into how social media is being used around events. The following study
focuses on the actual use of Twitter and gives recommendations on how you can apply the
findings to make your event a success.

The most important findings are:
1. Twitter Behavior at Events
The activity level of Twitter usage does not depend on
the size of the event. The ratio of users who tweet
about the event to event participants ranges from ten
percent (i.e. every tenth person at the event posts
about the event) up to 800% (i.e. eight times as many
people tweet about the event as there are
participants).

2. Social Media and the Event Lifecycle
60% of all Social Media communication takes place while
the event is being held. The remaining 40% split evenly
before and after the event – whereby a second spike
occurs a few days after the event. Over the various
phases of the event lifecycle the quality of the tweets
changes.

3. Social Media Power Users
Like in most media also on Twitter there are power
users that account for a large share of all tweets about
the event: 35% of the users posted 80% of the Twitter
content.

Read more about these findings in the study and find out how you can use these results to
get the most out of Social Media for your event.



Why You Should Observe Your Audience
Did you ever wonder how attendees behave and what they are thinking before, during, and
after your event? Today's Social Media tools allow you to find out exactly that while getting
valuable feedback from the people you care most about, your customers.
“Social Media is, at its most basic sense, a shift in how people discover, read, and share
news and information and content. It is a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming
monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many).” Brian Solis'1 definition points out
the dialog that is enabled by the variety of communication channels available to users
through Social Media. For the first time, conversation between consumer and provider is
possible – and this conversation can be systematically evaluated.
For this study, we chose the field of events. In particular we focused on the conversation
of event attendees on Twitter, which we considered as the medium which offers the
highest and most dynamic level of activity needed for such an endeavor. The following
study presents an analysis on participant feedback and takes a look at variations over ten
events. The aim is to draw conclusions from the behavior of attendees of events over the
medium Twitter. We then want to provide future event organizers with a reference so that
they can evaluate themselves.

The Data Source: Twitter and Ten Events
Twitter
To collect data for our analysis we chose the micro blogging site Twitter. First of all, there
are many tools to easily draw data about specific events from Twitter. In this case here we
used the program the Archivist2. With this application we were able to get a more or less
complete record of the discussion about special topics and events. Another reason why
Twitter seems to be a suitable channel to use for a study like this is the fact that active
Twitter users are so-called power users, up to date with the new technologies, and not
afraid to experiment and share their ideas which means that feedback given by them is
mostly on a qualitatively high level. Further, those people are able to think in 140
characters, i.e. they provide information with maximum content at minimum length.

The Events
It was first of all crucial that the events we wanted to observe are well-known and
important, with topics focusing on the web, Social Media or internet technologies. These
events were likely to host many active Twitter users whose activity could be observed and

1
Thought leader and author in new media.
2
The Archivist can be downloaded for free from http://visitmix.com/labs/archivist-desktop/.



later be analyzed. Further, we considered it important to choose an international set of
events from Europe, USA and Asia. Some events used amiando (http://www.amiando.com)
for event registration and ticketing, but this did not play a key role in their selection. Data
was collected from April to May 2010.
In the following short summaries of the 10 analyzed events are presented (in chronological
order).

Web 2.0 Expo 2010 (Web 2.0 Expo), San Francisco, USA
Web 2.0 Expo showcases the latest Web 2.0 business models, development paradigms and
design strategies. The attendees are next-generation web builders.

MarketingProfs B2B Forum (MarketingProfs), Boston, USA
The MarketingProfs B2B Forum has a broad-based B2B marketing educational program with
a special focus on integration of Social Media and search engine optimization. The
conference is for businesses who want to learn how to properly incorporate these
procedures into their strategy to improve sales results.

Frozen Rails, Helsinki, Finland
Frozen Rails is a top-class Ruby on Rails3 conference. The program of Frozen Rails includes
presentations from internationally renowned speakers from the USA, Finland, and the rest
of Europe. The organizers of Frozen Rails have a passion for Rails and for open source in
general.

Green Venture Summit 20 10 (GVS), Berlin, Germany
The Green Venture Summit 2010 is a new, international Cleantech conference, with topics
from areas such as renewable energy, solar, wind, energy storage, energy efficiency, smart
grid, smart home, green architecture, green agriculture, water and green management.
The conference is targeted at startups, investors, thought leaders and successful ventures.

Next 10 (Next), Berlin, Germany
The Next 10 conference is one of the most important networking and trend conferences
within the European web industry. It is the only conference that unites the Internet
community with various brands and leading companies.

Art Directors Club Summit (ADC), Frankfurt, Germany
The ADC is considered to be the biggest meeting of the creative industry in the German
speaking area. The ADC is divided into multiple sections: ADC Competition, ADC Expo, ADC
Congress, ADC Awards Show and ADC Junior Days.

3
Ruby on Rails is an open source web development framework for the Ruby programming language.



SWITCH Conference (Switch), Coimbra, Portugal
The aim of the Switch Conference is to get attendees together with scientists,
entrepreneurs, thinkers, doers and everyone in between to share their knowledge, their
experiences and their ideas to create awareness on scientific and technological matters.

TEDxTokyo, Tokyo, Japan
The goal of this conference is to spark deep discussions and connections in groups both
intimate and expansive. TEDxTokyo combines live speakers and TEDTalks videos from the
main TED conference. The intention is to help shape a sustainable future for Japan and the
rest of the world.

Future of Web Design (FOWD), London, UK
The web design industry's leading and most inspirational conference puts the 'design' back
in web design. FOWD offers sessions on the entire design process – ranging from inspiration
to build to project management.

Gilbane Conference (Gilbane SF), San Francisco, USA
The Gilbane Conference is focused on global, enterprise, and web content management
technologies, enterprise search, text analytics and semantic technologies, collaboration &
enterprise Social Media, XML and publishing technologies.



Analysis
What We Wanted to Find Out
In the following study, three main questions are addressed:
1. Twitter behavior at events: First of all, we want to look at the behavior of event
attendees on Twitter. We want to know how many active Twitter users there are and what
their level of activity is, i.e. how many messages related to a specific conference they
write. Thereby we can get a general idea of the Twitter usage at events.
2. Social Media and the event lifecycle: The second point of interest is the Twitter usage
over the event lifecycle. In this step we want to look at the main topics discussed over
time in the Twitter community. The goal is here to find a pattern over time in order to
give recommendations on what activity and content to focus on over the event lifecycle.
3. The most active Social Media users: The last question is about the group of active
Twitter users who write about the events. We want to look at the level of activity of
individual users. Thus we can find out if there are user groups to focus on when planning a
Social Media campaign or strategy.

General Statistics
During the whole period we collected 31,442 tweets posted by 9,736 active Twitter users
at ten events. This makes an average number of 3.2 tweets per person – whereby the
majority of active Twitter users only posted one tweet (see detailed analysis below). The
events ranged from about 200 to several thousand participants and lasted 2.5 days on
average.
Number of tweets 31,442

Average number of 3.2
tweets per user
Average number of 3,144
tweets per event
Table 1: Descriptive statistics.



Twitter Behavior at Events
In the following we want to look at the distribution of active Twitter users and tweets per
event compared to the number of attendees.
Our tests showed that neither the number of tweets nor of active Twitter users per event
seems related to the number of visitors.
Instead we found another interesting phenomenon which is depicted in Figure 1: the ratio
of active Twitter users versus the number of attendees reveals a wide range: at most
events this ratio is smaller than one, i.e. there are less people who tweet about the event
than attendees. But, surprisingly, some conferences have two to eight times more people
who tweet about the event than attend it.

Most Events Have Less Active Twitter User
Than Attendees
2

Ball size
represents
1 number of
events

0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Active-Twitter-users/attendees ratio
Source: amiando.com , 2010

Figure 1: Ratio of active Twitter users vs. attendees.

The explanation for this is that most (especially smaller) events are discussed in a certain
community or interest group around it. This group naturally does not only consist of the
few people that attend the conference. So people talk about the topics of the conference
and mention the event despite they never attended it. For example at the MarketingProfs
event there are two times more people tweeting about it than attendees. A lot of
individuals who have not attended the conference have tweeted about it. They retweeted
for example interesting findings of the panels, used the conference as a vehicle for not
directly related information or just communicated within their peer group that they would
not attend the conference.



Another example for this is the TEDxTokyo conference. Over eight times more active
Twitter users talked about the event than physically participated. What is special about
TEDxTokyo is that the conference was streamed live online so people could follow it from
home. Only a selected set of people was invited to the live event. So here it is self-
explaining, why the ratio between attendees and active Twitter users is so high – a lot of
people watched it online and talked about it as if they were there.

How to Use This for Your Event

It is not about size but about content. The size of an event is not an indicator for Twitter
activity, but the provision of content is. If you want your attendees to tweet about your
conference, you have to offer them opportunities, i.e. material that they want to spread.
One possibility here is to publish data online. Another means to provide additional content
on your event is to make selected speeches available online, either live or via download on
your site. Thus you reach a broader audience and thus more people talk about your event
or share it - but be aware that your event becomes less exclusive to the visitors, in the
worst case they would rather attend online than come to your conference. You have to
make sure that the conference is still worth visiting.
Finally, you can also animate your participants to tweet about your event by e.g.
organizing raffles or other games for your active Twitter users. It is on you to provide
material for Twitter activity.

Think of the community around your event. Especially if your event is very small
compared to the interest group around its topic, you have to take into consideration the
people who do not attend your event but follow it on Twitter. In the first place they read
what your participants present. The recommendation here is to monitor what the
attendees tweet and then to react on it. For example you can retweet especially good
feedback and citations from speeches or you can provide information you do not want to
hold back from your online audience. The latter might also be your future customer, so
make sure you take care of negative feedback and show presence on Twitter or other
relevant channels.



Social Media and the Event Lifecycle
To find out how active Twitter users behave over the lifecycle of an event, we assessed
the distribution of the tweets over time. As can be seen in Figure 2 most tweets are posted
during the event. A closer look at the skewness of the graph indicates a difference
between the share of tweets before and after the event.

Twitter Usage Peaks at the Event
Cumulative number of tweets

9000
8000
7000
6000
5000
4000
3000
2000
1000
0

Number of days before and after the event
Source: amiando.com, 2010

Figure 2: Cumulative distribution of tweets before, during and after the event.

This becomes even clearer in Figure 3. TEDxTokyo, as well as a lot of other events, shows a
second, smaller peak about four days after the event. This second peak is caused by the
publication of event content, e.g. video recordings, a few days after the event.

There Seem To Be Slightly More Tweets After the Event
1800

1600

1400
Number of tweets

1200

1000

800

600

400

200

0

Number of days before and after the event
ADC GVS Frozenrails Gilbanes Switch Next MarketingProfs TEDx FOWD


Figure 3: Distribution of tweets before, during and after the event.



A more detailed analysis (Figure 4) reveals that the difference between the number of
tweets before and after the event is minor. With more than half of the tweets, i.e. 60%,
the main conversation takes place during the event; the activity after the event is more
intensive by only a slight trend of four percent. To assess the tweets over time in more
detail, it is of interest, what quality the tweets are, i.e. what the attendees talk about in
their posts.

The Majority of All Tweets Is Posted During
the Event
Tweets after Tweets before
event event
22% 18%

Tweets during
event
60%

Figure 4: Percentage of tweets before, during and after the event.

For this analysis a significant sample of tweets was randomly selected and each of them
was read and categorized. Three categories were established, “positive”, “negative” and
“neutral”. This categorization scheme gives a rough idea about the content of the tweets.
Negative means that active Twitter users wrote something negative about the event, for
example that they were not content with the speaker or with the organization. A positive
comment meant that they appreciated something related to the event, for example they
wrote something positive about the content of a presentation or speaker. Tweets about
something else, for example information or off-topic questions were placed in the neutral
category.



Most Tweets Are Neutral
positive; 8.45%
negative; 0.35%

neutral; 91.20%


Figure 5: Classification of tweets.

As shown in Figure 5, most tweets were neutral. They represented 91.2% of the total
number of tweets. 8.45% of tweets were positive, while the percentage of negative tweets
was practically negligible, representing only 0.35%.
Here is a wrap-up what the dominant topics before, during and after the event were:
Before the event  Who is attending
 Carpool organization
 Advertisements of the organizers, hotels
 What session to attend
 Announcements of speakers
 Program information, latest news by organizers

During the event  Information sharing
 Citations of speakers
 Last-minute advertisements of the organizers, speakers, exhibitors
 Private conversations
 Comments on the conference and related occurrences

After the event  (positive) Feedback on the event
 Take-aways from the event
 Topic related things
 Links on material from the event
Table 2: Content of tweets.



The event-lifecycle analysis combined with a qualitative assessment of the tweets provides
a good basis for interpretation. We have seen that most of the tweets were neutral. This is
confirmed by the wrap-up of the dominant topics listed in Table 2: Most of the topics are
not direct feedback on the event or organization. The tweets rather contain information or
citations that are shared, communicative messages or advertisements before and at the
event. This shows that Twitter is primarily used as an informative channel, most messages
contain conference or topic related information and links - especially after the event.

Twitter is rarely used as a feedback channel, but if so, then mainly positive feedback is
shared. The interpretation for this can also be found in nature of Twitter as an information
channel. Most of the positive feedback is posted together with a link or a source.
Therefore, readers are able to follow the positive opinion of the author. Some positive
feedback also contains hints or recommendations directed at the reader - as if the purpose
was to teach something. Negative feedback, for example on the organization, seems to be
harder to understand for the readers.


Pay special attention to Twitter activity during the event. During the event, active
Twitter users post a lot of information, either on the conference or directly on the
speeches. From these posts valuable learnings can be drawn, for example what are the hot
topics, or what is the best speech. With this information systematic advertisements can be
placed or other short notice program activities for the benefit of the attendees can be
initiated. The recommendation here is to carefully monitor Twitter and decide on an
appropriate reaction. The monitoring can be automated with a tool like Tweetdeck4. It is a
tool which displays all messages to an event and its related hashtags in real time and
allows you to keep track of all messages so that you can plan your reactions carefully.

Provide online material after the event. We have seen that even after the event Twitter
usage can be fostered. The event is not finished after the actual happening is over - the
active Twitter users talk about it for a few days. For an event organizer or speaker the
days after the event are perfect for preparing a wrap-up and other material and put it

4
Tweetdeck can be downloaded for free from http://www.tweetdeck.com/desktop/.



online after a few days. Thus the attendees get new input on their discussion to share and
a new peak occurs.

Social Media Power Users
The maximum number of tweets written by one person was 399, followed by another
individual with 219 tweets. But most of the active Twitter users, specifically 6,347 (65%),
tweeted only once and 1,235 active Twitter users wrote two tweets. Figure 6 shows the
distribution of tweets among all active Twitter users – it becomes obvious that a fairly
small part produces the majority of tweets: 35% are responsible for 80% of the posts.

35% of the Active Twitter Users Produce 80% of the
Tweets
100%

90%

Cumulative percentage of Twitter users
80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

Cumulative percentage of tweets

Figure 6: Active Twitter users vs. tweets per event.

The analysis shows that there are a lot of random users and a relatively small part of
power users. This distribution is a common phenomenon. The power users are those who
tweet a lot and have in addition to that usually a very large group of followers, i.e. a lot of
people read what they write. Thus they have great influence. They owe their followers the
news and thus they keep on tweeting - however, only few people have this status. In
contrast to the power users, people who tweet only one or two times usually have a very



small entourage on Twitter. They do not feel the obligation to tweet so much information
and are less influential. The majority of the people belong to this group


Pay attention to the power users. Power users make only a small part of the people who
are tweeting at events, but they have a lot of influence. Their many followers read and
retweet their tweets or comment them. Thus they are strong multipliers for both, positive
and also negative comments. Further, power users are also a good indicator for the hot
topics of the conference and therefore represent a valuable source of information which
can be used for systematic marketing and advertisement campaigns. Our recommendation
is to monitor power users carefully. You can use the free online tool Twittergrader5 to
evaluate how influential a Twitter user is. In case of negative posts, immediate action is
required e.g. by answering them or taking care of the problem brought up by them.

Encourage the random users. The users who post only one or two messages can be
animated to tweet more. The best way to do that is to directly address them and start a
conversation. Thus they notice that others are reading their messages and feel encouraged
to tweet more, e.g. feedback or information. Also the small users can be turned into
information sources.

A Last Word: Applying these Findings to Other Social Media
With this study we wanted to find pattern in the behavior of active Twitter users at
events. We have found some valuable insights and have drawn conclusions which help to
optimize the usage of Twitter as a Social Media channel for events.
However, the findings and implications we have presented in this study are based on the
usage of Twitter only. But Social Media in general consist of a lot more channels than only
Twitter. Although Twitter is a widely-used dynamic medium there are a lot more channels
to take into consideration when planning an integrated Social Media strategy. The results
we gained here might not have occurred in the same way in other Social Media. But we
also want to point out that a lot of the recommendations we gave can be applied to other
Social Media, too.
5
Twittergrader can be accessed for free at http://twittergrader.com/.



The Authors

Dennis von Ferenczy Sandro Spiess Anja Staudt
Co-founder Social Media Marketing Social Media Marketing
Head of Business Development Manager Manager
& Strategy
dennis.ferenczy@amiando.com sandro.spiess@amiando.com anja.staudt@amiando.com

About amiando – event registration & ticketing
amiando (http://www.amiando.com) is a pioneer for online registration and ticketing.
Since its founding in 2006 amiando has become a leading software-as-a-service platform
for professional events.
amiando’s products help event organizers reach a professional level of event organization
that until now was only reserved for large corporations and event agencies. All tools are
online-based and immediately available for use, no software installation required. Over
100,000 events worldwide use amiando for invitation management, participant
registration, online promotion and payment handling, among them such prestigious names
as Facebook, BMW, UNESCO, and Telefónica O2.
amiando has been awarded numerous prizes for its innovative products, among them the
“Technology Pioneer of 2010” at the World Economic Forum, and the „eco Internet Award”
as the best business client portal. The company is supported by prestigious Venture
Capitalists such as Wellington Partners, Adinvest, and a network of international Business
Angels

Information, Links Contact
amiando: http://www.amiando.com Dennis von Ferenczy
amiando features: http://www.amiando.com/features Phone: +49.(0)89. 5 52 73 58-32
amiando press: http://www.amiando.com/press Tumblingerstr. 23
amiando blog: http://blog.amiando.com 80337 Munich, Germany
dennis.ferenczy@amiando.com


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