Live-tweeting Best Practices

What is live-tweeting?

Live-tweet (v.): to engage on Twitter for a continuous period of time—anywhere from 20 minutes to a few hours—with a sequence of focused Tweets. The focus can be a big live event that everybody's paying attention to (e.g. a TV show or an award show) or it can be an event you create yourself (e.g. a Q&A session with your fans).

One question we always hear is "how often should I Tweet when live-tweeting?" Approach it like you're at a dinner party: you don't want to dominate the conversation and you don't want to fade away. Tweeting every minute is probably too much, and tweeting only a few times an hour is probably too little. What follows are our best practices, and periodically we'll tweet out great examples from @TwitterMedia so follow that account for the latest.

Why live-tweet?

Live-tweeting is an easy, flexible way to turbocharge your engagement on Twitter. We've found that across many different genres and levels of celebrity, it consistently boosts retweets, @mentions, and new followers:

  • Kyra Sedgwick saw an 18X increase in daily mentions of her handle and a 3X increase in daily followers when she live-tweeted the summer finale of her show The Closer in September 2011.
  • The Rock saw a 13X increase in daily mentions and a 3X increase in daily followers when he engaged in a Q&A with his followers using the #RockTalk hashtag in August 2011.
  • Trey Wingo saw a 9X increase in daily mentions and a 2.5X increase in daily followers while covering all the games on an NFL Sunday in September 2011.
  • Lea Michele live-tweeted her vantage point at the Emmys in September 2011, and the result was a 3.5X increase in daily mentions and a 2X increase in daily followers.

But perhaps the most important reward you'll get from live-tweeting is this: your followers will learn that your voice on Twitter is unique and authentic, and they'll be game to join you again the next time.

Here's how to get started:

Use a hashtag

The first step is easy: use a specific hashtag in your Tweets to set them apart from your day-to-day output and provide context for your followers. If you're live-tweeting about an event, the hashtag ensures that your Tweets will be part of the larger conversation, too. (For instance, if you were tweeting about the Emmy Awards, you'd use the hashtag #emmys.) On the other hand, if you're creating a Twitter event of your own, you can create an original hashtag to go with it. The Rock started a live Q&A called #RockTalk in late August 2011:

Over the course of two hours of live-tweeting, his followers were treated to candid responses from one of their favorite personalities:

Play to your strengths

Focus on the kind of Tweets that only you can create. If you're tweeting an event, that could mean sharing your insider perspective, especially if you're behind the scenes or sitting in the audience yourself. You know your style and your strengths: will you simply report on what's happening or share strong opinions? Will you answer questions from your followers or keep it one-way? Will you play the role of the expert or the explorer? The key is to do what comes naturally to you.

Trey Wingo is one of the hosts of NFL Network's NFL Live, but he uses Twitter on game days to keep his followers up to date on everything that's happening across the league. He throws out facts...

... and comments on big moments:

He's become the go-to football live-tweeter, providing an insider perspective for everyone who cares about the sport.

Add photos

Photos resonate on Twitter, especially when they show scenes that your followers don't usually get to see.

Don't underestimate the power of a zoomed-in detail: you can show your followers what shoes you're wearing or who you're sitting behind at the big award show. For example, check out this great Tweet from Lea Michele during the Emmys:

The technical side of live-tweeting

When you live-tweet, you always need to be aware of which followers are seeing which Tweets. In general, you can be liberal with @replies; most of them won't show up in your followers' timelines unless they also follow the person you're talking to.

For example, this Tweet is only visible to the followers of @TwitterMedia who also follow @TheCloser_TNT:

But this Tweet is visible to all of @TwitterMedia's followers because the @ symbol comes in the middle of the Tweet:

Therefore, one good approach for a Q&A is to retweet a question to all of your followers, then answer it with a Tweet of your own, making sure not to start the Tweet with a @reply, because you want all your followers to see it. That's what Justin Timberlake did when he conducted his #AskJT session in July 2011.

First, he retweeted a question from a fan...

...then, he answered it with a Tweet of his own:

You can also quote a Tweet and respond with one or two words of your own. That's what Kyra Sedgwick did when she live-tweeted the summer finale of her show "The Closer" in September 2011:

There are many ways to get the right Tweets out to the right people. The key is to understand that when you @reply to a Tweet, it's not guaranteed that all of your followers will see it, so you need to plan for the effect that you want.

How many Tweets?

It's important to realize there's no predefined optimal number of Tweets to send in a live-tweeting session. You've got to do what feels right. Tweet when you're inspired. If you're not inspired: just answer questions, or play reporter and comment on events as they unfold.

If a live-tweeting session just doesn't take off: that's fine. Call it a day and wait until next time. But conversely, if you're getting great engagement and your followers are @replying you and retweeting you like crazy, there's nothing they want to hear more than: "Okay, you know what? I'll stick around for another fifteen minutes."

Of course, you should be conscious of that fact that you're tweeting more than normal, and possibly filling up some followers' timelines—but don't stress. Time and time again, we see that live-tweeting leads to follow growth.

During a screening of his film "Private Parts" on HBO in February 2011, Howard Stern tweeted a live commentary track to his followers. He shared insights that you'd never get just watching the movie:

He sent hundreds (!) of Tweets over the course of the movie's airing, and that provides an important insight: When you sit down to live-tweet, you don't know how many Tweets you'll send. There is no quota—no right or wrong number. That said: for most people, tweeting every minute is too much (unless your current situation is incredibly unique) and tweeting less than four times in an hour is too little.

Remember this is not the time to drive traffic back to your website. You want your followers to stay engaged here on Twitter—to keep @replying and retweeting you. So feel free to tweet a link, but do it only at the very end of your live-tweeting session.

No time like the present

The wonderful thing about live-tweeting is that it's so easy: you don't need anything other than Twitter itself and a little bit of time. Justin Timberlake conducted his #AskJT Q&A session from the plane. You can live-tweet from the green room. You can live-tweet from the cab. You can live-tweet from home. You can live-tweet... right now.