Use Twitter and Tweetchat for your next webinar

I just finished watching a webinar from Hubspot, unlike any I’ve watched before. Here’s why:

All too often, typical webinars drone on and are pretty boring. My typical experience is to listen while perusing blogs or cleaning out my inbox. As a result, listener engagement is very low. I’ve conducted webinars with 500 attendees and got maybe 12 comments — just 2% audience participation.

This webinar was different. At the start, the moderator told everyone to follow #hubspot on Twitter. What happened was amazing: a firehose of realtime commentary on the webinar. Literally hundreds of comments. Which made it much more engaging and useful. I stayed tuned in to the content, and hundreds of others apparently did as well. We’ll probably remember this webinar far longer than others. And that makes it a more effective event.

As a bonus, this firehose of tweets drove #hubspot to be featured on the home page of Twitter Search, as one of the top four trending topics. This was free advertising that lead to even more webinar participation.

So, next time you do a webinar, start off by picking a unique keyword to follow on Twitter (e.g., #yourcompany). Then show a quick demo on how to use Tweetchat to let the audience follow in real time. Only after that demo should you dive into your actual presentation. You’ll get more attendees, higher audience engagement, longer recall, and a slew of good questions to make for compelling Q&A.

Why do I like Tweetchat for webinar audience participation? It automatically inserts the keyword into every post. Unlike Twitter Search, it updates automatically, AJAX-style. It’s better than Tweetdeck (my default Twitter client) since there’s nothing to download.

Have you participated in a webinar that had Twitter audience participation? How well did it work?