Twitter recently announced two additions to its already existing product: group direct messaging and mobile video camera.

Your first impulse might be to shake your head at having one more thing to learn. But, in reality, Twitter has just given event professionals two extremely powerful tools for live events.


Don’t believe us? Here is how we see the new tools affecting upcoming events:


Group Direct Messaging


This tool will allow you to message up to twenty users privately. Alone, that doesn’t sound that impressive. Add it to an event, however, and you have a great way to alert those attending your event.


How do we see this working? By creating highly segmented groups of attendees, you can alert just those that might be affected by a change at an event. You could send a survey to just those that attended a particular breakout just as it’s ending. Or how about directing a particular set of attendees to a part of your event that might interest them? And since scavenger hunts are still popular at events, why not send clues to teams via this new feature? In a world where we are constantly trying to personalize attendees’ experiences, this social media tool could be a great part of that.


But there is one thing you will have to still be careful about doing, and that is spamming your attendees. Make sure any message that you send via this channel is highly personalized to that subset of attendees. Sending the same message over and over again is not useful, and you will be better served to do that via a tweet on your event’s hashtag.


Mobile Video Camera


It was bound to happen. Twitter has always been a great breaking news app, and with phone cameras getting better every day, it was time to add video to that breaking news. This tool will allow you to upload thirty seconds of video, and you can also easily edit that video as well. That gives breaking news a possibly sleeker moving image and a voice.


What does that mean to you? To start with, an expanded length of time to tell your story in real time. No longer are you stuck with Instagram’s fifteen-second or Vine’s six-second videos if you want to quickly upload a short video with easy editing tools. Thirty seconds is a more ideal length of time for testimonials, invitations to sessions and teasers about what is coming up throughout the event.


But this is signaling another change as well. With Facebook videos starting to be more effective on Facebook than YouTube videos, we see Twitter videos eventually overtaking YouTube videos on Twitter in a similar fashion. That means, your videos need to not only be YouTube-ready, but also ready for separate uploading to Facebook and Twitter. Despite the extra work involved, it is likely you will see overall views of your event videos increasing.


Do you think you will use these two new tools at your event? How?