Social networking is supposed to allow you to be more social. When you typically think of social networking, you are probably thinking about ways to connect with your customers, and how to engage them in order to influence their future buying habits.In all the talk about social networking to marketing your business, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that you can use social networking for your own enjoyment and education.
I reintroduced Twitter in yesterday's nugget and today I'm following it up with a simple way you can use it the next time you attend a trade show.
Twitter's network is built on the idea that you can categorize your messages into different broad subjects depending on the hashtag you include in your tweet. The hashtag is any word that you precede by the # symbol. Hashtags can be any combination of letters or numbers, but not special characters such as apostrophes or ampersands.
A search feature built into Twitter allows you to enter any hashtag to view all the recent tweets using it. This feature is built right into the Twitter website and the Twitter smartphone app. The search feature is also built into most, if not all, of the other smartphone apps and websites that are used to manage Twitter accounts.
People use Twitter to interact at live events by tweeting the same hashtag, that way everyone at that event can use the Twitter search to follow what's happening in real time.
As an example, during the MJSA Expo this month several people were including the hashtag #MJSAExpoNJ in their tweet. If you were an attendee at the expo, you could have followed the action of the weekend by watching all the tweets with that hashtag.
Here's a screen shot from the Twitter app on my smartphone:
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By following the hashtag, you can maintain an awareness of things happening around the live event. Surely that above tweet about Cindy Edelstein reminded several jewelry designers to visit her table. She was quite popular that day.
Going back in time 12 months, we can also see that attendees were also tweeting during the 2012 MJSA Expo. But in 2012, they used the hashtag "MJSAExpo" rather than "MJSAExpoNY" as they did this year.
Here's another screen shot from my smartphone when I search for that older hashtag:
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Naturally not all live events have associated hashtags; it depends on the technology sophistication of the attendees, and if the organization running the event promotes the use of the hashtag.
The JCK events are always all abuzz with tweets. They have a few different hashtags every year at their Las Vegas show in June. Their trade show guides promote the use of #JCKEvents, #JCK2013, and even #JCKRocksTheBeach.
By following the constant stream of tweets with these hashtags, you will be alerted of happenings that you otherwise might have missed.
Speaking of missed, at the 2013 JCK show I was among those who got locked out of the annual live concert at the Mandalay Bay beach because thousands of jewelers and their families came to see Maroon 5 perform.
Even though I didn't get to see the concert live, I was able to vicariously attend by watching all the tweets using #JCKRocksTheBeach. This is what it looked like:
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As you can see by these examples, Twitter isn't always about reaching your customers. It really can open you up to some new experiences while at industry events. JCK even holds a "Twitter Users party" during the concert to give you the opportunity to meet others who "live tweet" the event.
Hopefully you'll come to realize that Twitter isn't simply just another social media marketing tool, but it helps connect the real world with live information around you.
