SKEMA Digital Marketing in Tourism and Events: Twitter "Custom Timelines" about to change the event industry

Created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter is today one of the most famous social networks. At the beginning, it was a basic one, which allowed people to share information and to communicate sending short tweets. But the use of Twitter has evolved over the past few years. Indeed, celebrities began to use Twitter as a tool to create a “buzz” and remain close to their fans and followers. Then, some persons of interest as politicians and journalists joined Twitter to give their opinion or share information about current affairs. In 2012, the French television has also begun to be interested in Twitter for popular shows (like “Danse avec les Stars”) to create a real interaction between the audience and the TV programme. Progressively, Twitter is becoming more professional and is now used by companies and medias as an important and massive communication tool. Today, facing this success, some event professionals are starting to include Twitter in their activity.

Therefore, in order to keep growing and to be more and more used for professional purposes, Twitter has recently launched a new functionality: the “Custom Timelines”. This new tool is likely to definitely change the way organizations display tweets during events since it gives them more control over how tweets are organized and delivered on the Twitter platform. Indeed, until now, event professionals were not able to control what people were saying about their events on Twitter. Custom Timelines now allow them to show only the best tweets surrounding the event, removing non-constructive critics or unfounded sentiments, instead of relying on a hashtag to connect everything that is being said about the event.

In addition to moderate what is displayed on Twitter, this new feature offers organizations the opportunity to share the timeline with everyone via a specific URL, and to integrate it on their website to increase visibility.

Indeed, when a conversation takes off on Twitter around an event, event professionals can organize and put all tweets together in a same timeline. Custom Timelines are thus created, personalized and shared on Twitter as a new page; each timeline having its own page, making it easy for people to find any kind of information about an event. Moreover, the information will also be available after the event since the curated Twitter timeline can be embedded onto a website or a blog so that it will stick around forever.

As a result, this new tool is expected to boost the use of Twitter in the event industry, then implying a big change in the way events are managed by organizers and perceived by customers.

First of all, organizations have the opportunity to get instantaneous feedback about the event’s organization from customers, handle complaints as much as possible and constantly improve themselves in order fully satisfy attendees. Event professionals can therefore improve customers’ experience, while establishing strong relationships with them. Indeed, Twitter allows a constant interaction between the organization and its customers, making them feeling “specials”. They are in a sense involved in the creation of the event: their ideas, comments and suggestions are constantly taken into account.

Custom Timelines have thus great implications for the event industry, opening up interesting opportunities for event planners.

We have chosen these articles because we found them clear and relevant regarding our main focus, and more especially because they are taking into account current trends and current situations. In fact, nowadays, people are more and more “connected”, not only through computers but also thanks to smartphones and pads. Indeed, studies reveal that France counts more than 24.1 million of smartphones users and more than 18.4% of French have a tablet; (journaldunet.com) Allowing them to be always connected. That is why the use of social media applications becomes more and more interesting for companies, and we saw that Twitter is the most chosen. In fact, despite its huge popularity, Facebook (94% of people already use it) is not the most used. Once again, studies reveal that Twitter has become more and more downloaded for the past two years and an increase of 39% of users (representing 232 million new subscribers) has been registered in September, 2013 (silicon.fr) with still 2.1% of French users (statista).

As a conclusion, we can say that Social Media such as Twitter are currently taking more and more part of events and companies’ reputation; this is why companies and organizations have to be on the new wave.

Amélie Bertholet, Roxane Servela & Jennifer Thiry

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