12 Tips for Social Media Marketing for Events
So you have invested in an event, and we all know events are a big investment for brands.
You need a plan to ensure you achieve some return on your investment. Keeping your eyes on the prize of generating leads onsite makes sense.
Don’t underestimate how important it is to have a Social Media Event Marketing plan to capture as much lasting value as possible.
Think about how many prospective customers are at the event and how critical it is to make a personal connection and build relationships. Get connected on social BEFORE the event, preparing for a better in-person experience.
Events have so many valuable opportunities to tell stories and turn them into high-value content that will fuel future marketing campaigns.
12 Tips for Effective Social Media Event Marketing
- Create a Campaign Plan. An event-specific campaign for social. Define key topics to be shared pre, during and post-event.
- Design Graphics for Social Creative Content. Define key images to be shared pre, during and post-event.
- A Schedule. Use a simple work back schedule to time out the frequency of posts by channel.
- Task a lead onsite with the role of Social Event Manager. Define pre-event, onsite-event and post-event role responsibility.
- Have a pre-event campaign that gets your audience involved to help boost engagement and gain new brand exposure.
- Choose a primary social channel to focus on. Where ever the event audience is most active.
- Create a hashtag strategy. Do channel-specific hashtag research on your event, industry, audience, and location to establish which hashtags you’ll be using throughout the event. Commit to using the hashtags of the conference organizers, the official event hashtag, and look at what was used by past event audiences. Also, consider creating a company-branded hashtag that customers and influencers can all use.
- Host a pre-event event meeting for all onsite resource support and walk them through how to support the social media plan. Set expectations for sharing photos, video, how to tag, and which hashtag to use. Encourage tagging your brand, speakers, and comment on key learning.
- Post live from event updates regarding any changes and be responsive to inquiries.
- Reach out to partners to help each other co-promote, curating each other’s posts.
- A strong post-event call to action/conversion tactic: Invite show leads to an exclusive post-event webinar to understand your product in more detail – post-event social activity is a critical component towards building ROI.
- Have fun. The world needs more smiles. Ask attendees for quotes and a photo to post and tag them. Interview customers, speakers, and experts.
While your team onsite is super focused on preparing for the best event experience, who’s on point to drive the social media at the event? Prepare yourself and your team with a solid Event Marketing Social Media Campaign Plan.
While your team onsite is super focused on preparing for the best event experience, who’s on point to drive the social media at the event? Prepare yourself and your team with a solid Event Marketing Social Media Campaign Plan.
Ask yourself these questions.
- What is your organization contributing to the event and what does everyone want to achieve?
- How will you measure your achievements?
- Are you making any key announcements?
- Are you offering an event promotional price to drive sales?
- Are you speaking on a topic that every attendee should hear, but obviously everyone won’t?
- Could you do a better job of sharing your event content during and after the event?
By answering these questions, you and your team will have a better sense of your goals for the event and a strong understanding of the business reasons you’re attending or hosting the event. There’s nothing worse than having an event in your calendar that just seems like a waste of time with no clear objective! Once your goals are set, you can best determine the tactics that are going to help you reach them.
Once at the event, aim for maximum reach and engagement by capturing user-generated content with real people having real conversations. When shared virtually, these conversations can help raise the visibility of your brand presence and value.
Social media event marketing – content strategy
Dig into digital for your “In-Person Event” with some pre-event hype. Generating interest before the event will help you secure client meetings and get attendees more involved. Get creative by streaming live and posting content to encourage collaboration, networking, and learning that will ultimately generate more leads that convert to sales and increase your ROI.
Count on FOMO
Think about those affected by FOMO (fear of missing out)…those who didn’t attend but still have influence and possible opportunity to learn more about your brand and what they may have missed. Get creative and follow-up the event with a recording or webinar of the keynote, create a highlight reel for YouTube and repost user-generated content to ensure they’ll want to be there next year.
Benefits of social media at events: grow your digital presence & fuel your content marketing
Think about the value that comes together around an event. How will you ensure key stories are told and heard in a highly competitive environment? Harness that goodness with a social media event marketing plan that will capture and share valuable learning that will fuel your online marketing for months to come after the event.
- You have customers onsite to interview and encourage some user-generated content.
- You have sales experts onsite to interview who can articulate customer pain points and solutions you have to share.
- You have partners onsite to interview and learn how they complement your solutions.
- You have executives and senior decision-makers onsite to interview and capture vision statements.
- You have product experts onsite to interview and curate demos and presentations as teaser content and draw more meaningful conversions.
Capture Content and Reach Beyond Event Attendees:
- Think video. Capture and record demo’s, interactions, soundbites
- Set up formal and informal interviews
- Speaker session content could be shared on Linkedin via Slideshare
- Stream Live portions of a session
- Leverage presentation content by curating it, and publishing a lighter version for wider consumption with a strong CTA (call to action) to schedule a custom demo or call
- Create Post Event Highlight real and upload to YouTube Channel and your website
Keyword and hashtag research
Organic Search and Organic Social Media reach which requires you to do some Keyword and Hashtag research in advance. You should research each channel for active hashtags and think about reaching your audience, the geography your events in, and the event niche.
Generate More Value & ROI:
Monitor social activity pre, during and post-event. Growing your social network through these posts is a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) in addition to increased channel engagement.
Create your own list of opportunities and find inexpensive ways to capture video, take photographs, and ensure your entire team is sharing these with a chosen event hashtag.
Planning in advance is critical. Sounds obvious right? However, too often the energy becomes focused on in-person networking and learning. Unfortunately, so little is shared during or after an event.
We’d love to hear about your winning social media event marketing tactics.
At Digital Snapdragon we work with organizations to design custom social media strategies for events. We provide custom Social Media Training sessions to enable your feet on the street, level setting the skills and setting clear expectations with your staff onsite.
We can create Social Media plans that all your resources can get behind to engage with the Event Audience and beyond.
We’d love to hear about your winning social media event marketing tactics. Follow us on Linkedin to see get future posts.
Written by Kelly L. Nelson, Founder of Snapdragon Marketing Service which provides Social Media Marketing Management Services.
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