Posted on 16-October-2012   by Dee Ward

IPS Conference 2012 – Our Twitter Experiment

Each year we attend and exhibit at the Infection Prevention Society’s annual conference. This is our biggest event of the year and one where we, as a team, really enjoy attending – we get to meet and talk to many people (customers who, over the years, have become friends and colleagues), network with fellow professionals and exhibitors in the Infection Prevention field.

This year we had an extra goal in attending the conference – we wanted to create an online professional community using Twitter. We have strong relationships with our customers and business to business communities in our offline environments and part of our social media strategy is to deepen those relationships even further by leveraging the social media channels to facilitate this. For this conference we chose to educate the visitors to our stand about Twitter…by way of a fun competition giving away an iPad. We called it “Tweet4Treets” – people were encouraged to tweet us and use our hashtag for the day (#DanielsIPS), so that their tweet(s) appeared on our screens and we then had a draw for the iPad. (Naturally our staff were on hand to help create Twitter accounts for those people who were not already familiar with this social media platform).

We also introduced DANIbear…our small and cute social media mascot who comes with a little postcard telling you what to do with him (i.e. you take pictures of him at work or play and Tweet the picture straight to us at @DanielsHCareLtd). What these two activities did for us – was drive activity on our Twitter account and also demonstrate to people how Twitter works and how they can (very easily and quickly) communicate with us (and the IPS) on Twitter going forward. We had big screens up that showed their tweets – so it was a good visual display of how Twitter works.

We find Twitter (as a business tool) is a really easy way in which to share our experience and product knowledge with our followers (customers and strategic partners), as well as being able to answer our customers’ questions in a responsive way that supports them in their use of our products and services.

Twitter is also a great way to obtain and share feedback from our communities of customers and professional alliances – here are some of the tweets we got on the day from our fellow colleagues in the industry and customers:

The whole experience of this conference was made even better when we were awarded the Best Large Stand at the event! And…not to mention the popularity of DANIbear in the photos that have since been shared with us on Twitter. We had a fantastic time growing our Twitter followers and supporting the IPS in increasing their Twitter following at the same time. We trippled our followers over the three days, and managed to generate 500+ “mentions” in that time as well.

A big thank you to all of you who visited our stand on the day and made the whole conference interactive, engaging and totally worth the hours put in into planning and attending!

If you are one of our new Twitter followers or are interested in finding out more about Twitter and how you can use it going forward in your business – please feel free to pop a question in the comments below and we’d be more than happy to help where we can.

Dee Ward

Dee is the Customer Support and Marketing Manager at Daniels. She is the key force behind a motivated and responsive team who support the Daniels customers and sales representatives day in and day out.