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How to Write a Speech for the Tweets

Is your speech good enough to tweet? Or is it easy to tweet?

I didn’t think being the social media chair for a conference would be hard work. Go to a conference (on comedy, humor, and improv…fun) and live tweet. Take some pictures with my new sparkly iPhone. Post speaker quotes.

Easy peasy.

What a cool way to go through a conference looking for the best takeaways from each speaker. Laugh and tweet. Let’s rock n’ roll.

I was wrong – oh-so wrong. I spent most of the weekend rewriting what was said on stage, so that I could make it tweetable. It was mentally exhausting. Listening for nuggets of ideas to string together to make it social media worthy.

My only reprieve were the comedians. My thumbs couldn’t keep up with those guys and gals. Everything that came out of their mouth was pure Twitter magic.

Essentially it comes down to this tweet from The Big Funny:

There are no wasted words in jokes. @thebigfunny #CHI_Talks

— Chi Talks (@chi_talks) November 16, 2014

Speakers waste their words. Comedians don't.

Let’s face it – most speakers are lazy when it comes to choosing just the right word.

Showing up with little preparation, waiting for the muse to show up, doesn’t make a speech that tweets.

Speakers (all of us…myself included) could be better with the words we choose.

Words are the primary tools of speakers. The right word can change everything for the audience.

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and a lightening bug.” -Mark Twain

It’s time to start picking the lightening for social media wildfire.

How to write your speech for the tweets

Before I tell you how, let's chat about why you should care if your speech is shareable on social media.

With more and more conferences having their own hashtags and social media chairs responsible for live tweeting event, it is your job to writet a speech for the tweets.

It will make the social media chair's job easy and the meeting planner fall in love with you.

The benefit to you is having your words and twitter handle (what you’re not on Twitter…you should be…) re-tweeted across the Interwebs. You’ll get more followers, your message is more memorable, and heck it might even result in more gigs. 

Not everything in your speech needs to be a tweet (that’s a relief, right?). That would be like constructing a speech that rhymes – EUW! 

Here are 3 suggestions for embedding tweets into your speech:

Make your main points a tweet

The main points are the meat of your speech, so they need to be a tweets.

Main points are what drive you audience toward the final destination of your speech (what you want them to know, feel, or do).

Another way to think about this is that you are branding your speech with language that is uniquely you. You’ll show off your personality and make each point you make easy to write, repeat, and remember.

Tweet the takeaways 

Takeaways are what you want the audience to act on. Audiences are overwhelmed with information, and they can barely remember where they parked their car or what they had for dinner last night. If you want them to take an action, your job is to help them remember.

Create takeaways that are snappy and pithy – good for social media and good for remembering.

Spend extra time crafting your takeaway lines. Bonus points if you can make them rhyme, use alliteration, or say them more than once.

Your very last words on stage should be tweetable 

Did you know that most audience forget what you said about 90-minutes after you said it?

And what they remember most is what they hear last. 

The final thought of your speech shouldn’t be an afterthought but it does need to be a tweet.

What's the battle cry for the audience? If they remember nothing else from you, what's the one thing you want them to remember. Now write and rewrite your final thought, so that you make those last words social media friendly.

(Need help writing the last line of your speech? Grab the Audience Journey and never struggle with that tweetable closing line again).

If you don’t have time to craft every word of your presentation like the great Mark Twain, then at least create tweets for you main points, takeaways, and your closing line.

You’ve only got 140 characters, how are you going to use them to write a speech that tweets?