Conferences & events are a huge investment with no guarantee of a profit. Social media will help you see a real return.
Whatever
business sector you work in you are sure to have the opportunity to
attend numerous event during the year. Events are big business and it’s
a competitive marketplace. However, conference & event organisers
often fail to maximise the return on their investment by overlooking
the benefits which a dedicated social media marketing strategy can
bring.
Here are 10 quick tips to make social media boost your event marketing:
1. Speaker shout-outs
Industry
events often invite many key people to speak; both at seminars and
keynote sessions. Often speakers will have a good following on social
media. Speakers also love recognition. Take advantage of this and
‘big-up’ your speakers well before the event with a carefully
constructed activity on twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or Google+
This
will often elicit reciprocal shares & retweets from your speakers
(to their thousands of followers). This massively increased the exposure
of your event and helps you create a buzz. In turn, this ‘buzz’ can
encourage registrations and late sales. Tip: capture the twitter
handles of your speakers at registration page; saves you having to
search for them.
2. Sponsor love
Another good way
to build a buzz before an event is to make sure you have social media
activity relating to your sponsors and media partners. They will all
have official social media accounts too and a little effort to mention
them will also elicit tweets and posts from them. Don’t simply just
post that you’re pleased to have X sponsor for the event. Instead,
think about what the sponsors want to see. Look for news about your
sponsors and give that exposure too.
Aside from helping with the
buzz, it makes very good commercial sense to keep in with your sponsors
and a few unplanned tweets and posts will go a long way to making the
sponsors feel their investment has been beneficial.
3. Push the official hashtag
Get
in early with your official hashtag and make sure you use it all time
when posting about the event. Make sure it’s on your website and all
official correspondence and in your social media profile descriptions.
You should encourage people to use one hashtag – and well before your
event too.
If you do not then you are at the whim of the public,
and you don’t want that! All too often I have seen events have a poor
policy on hashtags and you end up having to construct a mind-bending
Boolean search phrase to try and capture all event activity on social
media.
Also, be sure to have the hashtag up on the welcome slides for the event to guide attendees on what to use.
4. Facebook custom audience adverts
Wouldn’t
you love to have all previous event attendees as fans of your event on
Facebook? What a great way to compliment your event eMarketing. Facebook now have a fabulous new feature which is perfect for event
organisers. You can now upload all your event registration email
addresses into Facebook to enable you to show “like us” adverts to all
those now already fans of your page. Believe me, it’s tricky to set up
but these super-targetted ads will have an excellent click ratio and
will cost as little as $0.02 per like.
5. Don’t concentrate on one platform
People
consume social media via a number of platforms. It is highly
recommended to have a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ &
LinkedIn. This ensures you enable people to connect with you by their
preferred channel and you maximise your reach potential.
6. Consider multi-language postings
Some
conferences choose to host in different international cities. If this
is the case then do not overlook the local population. They can often
provide much needed footfall and local buzz for your event. Take time
to provide some social media activity in the local language(s) as well
as English.
7. Embrace live feedback
Some events
miss a huge trick of not using Twitter to ask questions of the key
speakers during events. Questions and feedback can be made by those in
the room and around the world. I’ve seen this done only a few times
and it’s great, it creates a real connection between the event and the
outside world looking in via social media.
In addition, social
media can be a great customer service channel. Have dedicated
operational people online to deal with issues from attendees can really
boost the event experience for those concerned.
8. Create an ‘event echo’
Events
take a huge amount of effort and then *puff* it’s all over. Event
organisers often make the mistake thinking ”phew, I’m glad that’s
over”. They ignore the PR & marketing benefits of recycling event
content after the event has ended, the ‘marketing echo’.
Often
events will be sitting on a gold-mine of content which can be recycled
long after the event has ended. Slideshows, official guide articles,
video and research can all be repackaged and used on social media to
boost the event’s profile in the quiet months after an event.
Those
‘quiet’ months are often when you need to be securing next year’s
sponsors and big-ticket exhibitors. No better time to be appearing
energetic and relevant in the eyes of those key individuals.
9. Pre-plan social reminders
You
know when all your key events are taking place so why wait until the
day to tweet reminders like ”Seminar reminder; X will be speaking in
room 1 on Y in 10 minutes”? You can schedule all these reminders well in
advance using Tweetdeck, Hootsuite of Buffer – leaving you free to do
the interesting stuff on the day. Beware of any last minute
cancellations of delays though – as you’ll need to amend your scheduled
posts.
10. Swamp the event
For the big events, it
pays dividends having roving reporters capturing content. A small social
media team will be unable to capture enough footage and news to do your
event justice. Make a concerted effort to get more people out there
capturing what matters to you and get it out on social media. If your
budget is tight then consider engaging some local marketing students.
Organise
your team to video some ‘vox pops’ – short, simple interviews with key
people. Ask them a few standard questions about the event. This is
great content to use after the event and it makes your key people feel
good about you event – and that’s never a bad thing.
I hope this is helpful and good luck with your next event!
To see the full article, see: http://www.gingerjuice.co.uk/event-marketing-with-social-media/
Any comments? Email sarah@mashmedia.net
