Event Marketing: Leveraging Social Media at Your Event

It's not an easy task to take a big idea and turn it into a one-of-a-kind, sell out event, but strategic digital promotion is your golden key to success. Social media plays a big part in event marketing and, if planned and executed correctly, it can boost your ROI and create the right kind of buzz. To generate meaningful engagement, It’s essential to know what, where, and when to post on social media.

Passionate digital marketer and Corporate Business Development Manager at Venuemob, Sanna Griffin, talks us through some key tips and tricks that’ll help you kick-start your event marketing strategy and generate substantial engagement with your crowd.

Pre-Event

First things first: decide on a unique hashtag for your event. Use your brand or event name, but keep it as relevant and focused as possible. Hashtags are your event marketing supercharger, making it easy for everyone to follow social chatter around your event, and encouraging attendees to interact with each other in a meaningful way.

It’s important to note that nearly as many people are talking about the event before the action takes place as they are during the event itself. The astute event organiser involves attendees from the get-go by promoting their hashtag up to a week before the event. You can even incorporate social sharing buttons on your event registration page so that guests can share their attendance after they’ve registered.

Create that meaningful social buzz by posting pre-event ‘behind the scenes’ snapshots and sharing profiles of your key-note speakers. Remember though, that all images posted should be visually engaging and high quality. If you’re not the best photographer, hire a professional.

During the event

Make your chosen hashtag know to your audience by getting your – obviously endlessly charismatic – MC to announce it over the course of the event. This is an important step in ensuring that you generate the desired activity across all social media channels.

If you would like your event crowd to snap and share lots of pictures during the event, be creative with event styling and entertainment. People are more likely to share their experience if they see something memorable. Think whimsical flower wall displays, floating dessert tables or anything unique that will get people to take their smartphones out of the pockets and start snapping.

Our hot tip:  hire a professional event photographer to capture all the action at your event. This will give you a beautifully curated archive of high quality images that can be used across your social channels long after the event has taken place.

New technology is another element of your event that will generate genuine interest and engagement from your attendees. Live social media walls are becoming very popular at events, as they promote a tech-savvy atmosphere and position your company as ahead of the new technology game. Plus, people love seeing their face on the screen, so it's a bit of fun to publicly display guest social media content. Another plus? You’ll have access to live feedback without having to send detailed post-event surveys.

It’s important to be ‘always on’ at your event, so consider assigning someone to manage your social presence throughout the day. In order to be part of the action, you should be sharing images and video, reposting content from attendees and responding to comments and tweets in real time.

Post Event

Maintaining buzz after an event is just as important as generating it in the first place. If your attendees stop engaging with the event as soon as they leave, then all your hard work in the lead-up will be wasted. Write up a blog post, share event highlights and images of key moments, thank the speakers online, and acknowledge those who shared your content.

To monitor the success of your event,  make use of free social media analysis and  reporting tools such as Google Analytics, Cyfe and TalkWalker. These tools will allow you to find out the number of impressions generated from your activity, identify key influencers and find relevant related hashtags. And in turn, these complex insights and statistics will inform your next event’s engagement strategy.

To accelerate the success of your event, activate a social media strategy as soon as your venue is booked, choose a hashtag that truly captures the essence of your event and monitor your social media presence before, during and after the event.

Looking for more ways to enhance your conference or event? Check out these top 5 tech tips and trends for conferences in 2017 >>>

Planning a company event, product launch or showcase? Chat to a member of our Corporate Business Development team >>>