Kathleen Laney and Bob Harkins spoke about Social Media at PIE 2017. However, Astrid and I spent the days leading up to their presentation tweeting everything we could find about PIE. Hundreds of tweets, which begat 100s of retweets reaching around the world.
Two cases in point.
Astrid was live tweeting Paul Barter’s keynote on Wednesday (above) and we actually got responses while the talk was ongoing asking us to ask Paul specific questions about his talk. Let me tell you I was impressed. I also got an email from Australia that said in part “I see from twitter PIE is going gangbusters and Paul Barter is speaking. Since he is from Singapore, do you think he would be a good fit for our events here in OZ.” The Prez of the Parking Association of Australia was following twitter. Who would have thunk it.
Kathleen pointed out that social media is a long slog — we have been working twitter and its ilk for a couple of years. Astrid has 1840 followers, I have 1409. (She works harder than I do). It turns out that there are two issues when tweeting – one is “Hashtag #” the other is including someone’s twitter handle. Hashtag is a way of searching – if you put in #pieshow2017 anything with that hashtag will show up. If you include @laneysolutions Kathleen will be notified that she was mentioned in a tweet. So the more hashtags and handles you include, the wider the reach.
How did I learn this — by doing. I’m still not very good — and never will be since I’m not 14 years old. But experts like Kathleen and Astrid can wow the twitter universe.
Try it, you might like it.
JVH
