24 May Social Media and Your Event
Industry events are a wonderful opportunity to meet and greet stakeholders, to have real, substantial conversations about the issues that affect your industry, and to generate excitement about new products or services you might have to offer. The success of the event, of course, depends largely on attendance; the more people who show up, the easier it is to generate buzz. We’ve already created a brief guide on advertising your event, so today we want to delve deeper into an important element of advertising: social media. We’ll look at social media before, during, and after an event, to help maximize stakeholder involvement.
Social media is part clout game, part timing, and part genuine, interesting content. You don’t want to start posting on social media just to advertise your event; that will look like a promotional campaign, and the Internet tends to rail against obvious promotional campaigns. Before you even make a hashtag for your event, you should start posting other content that’s relevant to your business; videos showing your products being made, tips and tricks from an expert in your industry, or content by other creators you’ve found that’s relevant to your niche. Make sure to post across a variety of different streams, curating your content for each: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SnapChat – there are various ways to crosspost everything on each, if that’s what you want to do! Once you have a social media presence, you can start posting about your event, but avoid posting about it exclusively (though you can make a hashtag for it and include it in every post you make). When you hire event speakers, include them in your social media strategy – have them use the hashtag for your event and post about it once and awhile to build hype.
You’ll want to post consistently during the event itself – in fact, events are a prime spot for snapping great photos and videos of people enjoying themselves. The content more or less makes itself! Take snaps of the venue, the people, the speakers, awards ceremonies – whatever is happening and exciting! Posting about the event during the event will help build up hype for the next event you’ll host; always think about the future!
Once the event is done, you’ll want to post about it. Create highlight videos and photo galleries about the event. Thank attendees, speakers, guests, the venue, and anyone else who made the event happen; shout them out in your post by tagging them.
There are a few tactics you should be aware of when posting on social media. Analytic software that monitors user engagement, hashtags and mentions are extremely useful for measuring what content is most effective. You should also know the best times to post on social media – it varies from platform to platform. Follow all of these tips, and you’ll be sure to increase the buzz around all of your events; social media is a positive feedback loop. The more people who engage with your posts, the more their friends will!