Photo credit: Norwood Charity via Wikimedia Commons
Most marketers recognize that social media can be a powerful ally in promoting and measuring corporate events such as conferences, webinars and fundraisers. Aggressive use of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook can greatly enhance the more traditional media releases and email announcements to increase attendance.
Marketers have found that Twitter can be especially beneficial for business events. Both organizers and prospective attendees can quickly spread messages. Twitter’s hashtags help organize interests and generate conversations. LinkedIn Groups can also be valuable for promoting business meetings and training sessions. Facebook, of course, offers access to a huge base of potential attendees.
While most marketers now promote their events through social media, fewer employ social media during and after their events. According to EventTrack, nearly 77% of event marketers use social media before an event, while 61% use the networks after the event.
How to Collect Data during Events
Traditionally, PR and marketing personnel collect data before and after their events. That provides information about who attended the event but little else, explains Brian Friedman, founder and CEO of Loopd, in a blog post for KissMetrics.
Monitoring social media during events gives PR and marketing professionals powerful new tools to measure the effectiveness their events. Marketers can track the number of posts, number of images, and attendees’ sentiment toward the event. For instance, they can find if attendees felt inspired or complained about sessions. Organizers can share graphics based on trending quotes from sessions and point audiences towards presentations used during speeches.
Organizers can also send attendees surveys through social media during the conference when their memories remain fresh, rather than waiting until after it’s over. Ask attendees for their favorite topics, how they liked speakers and panel sessions, how long they stayed at sessions, and what topics they would like to see covered.
Social media can be used to:
• Answer any questions about the event. You can find these easier by setting up a search stream in Hootsuite that tracks any interaction containing a question mark, or “?”, with the keyword you choose.
• Encourage attendees and speakers to mention the event and share updates. By sharing news with their own followers both before and during the event, they’ll help spread the word. Remind speakers that more attendees mean greater exposure for them.
• Share interesting social messages. Select the most descriptive photos and videos from attendees and repost them on your own channels.
• Address complaints. An on-site support person can resolve problems. Thank the person who brought the issue to your attention and inform them that help is on the way. Of course, some complaints cannot be fixed at the time. In that case, use them to improve the next event. Documenting all suggestions or complaints will help you evaluate the event and make improvements.
• Share messages. Sharing the best posts, photos and videos and incorporating them in your blog or web can increase the visibility of the event.
• Reward attendees for tagging their messages with the event hashtag. That will encourage social activity.
• Gamify the social media sharing experience by organizing a scavenger hunt or a “photo booth” in front of an event poster, where attendees have to take a picture and tag it accordingly in order to be eligible for a prize.
• Display social media messages at the event. A screen or monitor at the venue that shows all social media messages about the event will inform attendees about the social conversations, and encourage them to participate.
Astute use of social media during a live event – or even a webinar – can make the event more fun for the attendees and can spread the word about the event.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
Thanks for sharing your tips! It’s important to engage your guests before the event and not forget about post event promotion.