WordPress Event Ticketing

We have been writing on several occasions about the importance of the social networks in the event organizing and covered many aspects of how to employ social networks to gain needed exposure for your event. But mostly we've been writing on how to use social networks before the day of your event. Now, what about using social networks right while the event is happening? How you can benefit from that? Keep on reading...

Is 140 characters really worth a hassle?

Short answer: Yes!

From its beginnings, Twitter saw many changes but the essential idea remained the same: 140 characters to say what you have to the whole world of your followers. Of course, over the course of time, many other features were added to this basic functionality such as picture sharing, creating polls, location sharing, etc but none of that surpassed the original phenomenon of simplicity with sharing 140 characters which is exactly why Twitter easily found its niche. It is not social network in its traditional sense nor it is instant messaging... it's a bit of all of that.

With hashtags as its cornerstone, Twitter positioned itself as top notch tool for precise tailoring of information of the interest for each of its users.

Oh wow... that's cool... but how does my event benefit from all that?

Right off the bat, you'd think that Twitter is helpful in creating a buzz prior the event which may be helpful for gaining more visitors and overall popularity of your event. And you are right. After all, you are an event planer or organizer and hardest part of your job is most likely prior the event itself. But your job description also states that you should make people feel good at your event and that event itself has positive vibration. And if you do that right, the success of your event will echo long after and will be great reference for you as an event organizer and for the event itself which is great starting point for the next event occurrence.

Ok, ok, enough babbling... I got it... let's get to the business!

As Tickera vastly depends on the greatness of WordPress and its plugins, we'll be sticking to that here and introduce an awesome plugin that was created for the biggest event in the world of WordPress - WordCamp. And what's good for event that gathers WordPress professionals is certainly good for your event as well. Right?

Plugin named WP Twitter Wall can be set up in as little as couple of minutes and does not require any special technical knowledge. Once set up it will allow you to present all the tweets that mention a specific hashtag which you can easily define in the settings of the plugin.

So, you only need a computer connected to the internet and video projector or large screen TV and you are all set up.

To set it up you'll just need to follow a few simple steps

And the result is simply astonishing. If set up correctly, this plugin will display tweets that contain hashtag or other term related to your event, in real time and on the large screen usually placed in the common area of your event.

But why is this important?

First off, once people realize that their tweets will appear live on the twitter wall, they won't hesitate to drop a tweet or two about the event. Yes, this can turn to rather amusing sort of public communication with others but in the background this makes several great things for your event. For example, there is exposure. Although many people will tweet just to see their tweet on the Twitter wall, they will actually make good marketing for your event and let know all the world (or at least their followers) that they are having a blast on your event. Once your event is over, these tweets will echo for a long time which is great on the long run if you intend on running your event again.

Also, these tweets will offer you a great insight on how people reacted to your event.

Take it this way: to get this kind of feedback, you would need to run a survey or ask one by one attendee how they feel about your event. And doing this wouldn't get you as half as good feedback compared to this.

Just bear in mind that they might tweet bad things as well. Yes, that might get a bit hairy but at least you will know what exactly bothered people on your event and it will make it so much easier for you to address that on your next event. So, either way, you will get a high quality, realistic feedback from your attendees with minimum hassle.

Excuses?

No excuses. Knowing all this, there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn't implement this to your next event. Not to mention that apart for being useful for your event, this might sky rocket your Tweeter account literally over night.

Have better solution or ideas for implementing more social network solutions for the events? Great! We would like to know all about it so please let us know in the comments below.