Making Your Next Event More Social Than Ever

Social media continues to revolutionize the way we interact in our personal and professional lives. When people communicate using social media, they tend to send out short, concise messages to a trusted network of friends, family, or like-minded people with a concrete ask: take action, follow this link, read this story, share this with others, or express their opinion. They may share an event invitation, tweet a memorable quotation or idea expressed by a speaker, or share a clip of a video or podcast.

You can leverage the power of these same social media tactics to effectively promote and drive interest in a business event. Using social media to add a new dimension to successful events is a trend being adopted by strategic, forward-looking businesses and organizations. However, it is important to focus on a comprehensive approach to integrate social media into your events. I recommend breaking it down into three areas of focus:

Before the Event

1. Promotion: Use the days and weeks before the event to help drive awareness and promotion. Social media provides an exciting way to get the word out and allow users to spread it within their networks.  There is a strong chance they are connected to like-minded people who might be interested in the same topics and would consider attending. Make it easy for folks to share information about the conference – including registration – through their social media environments.
2. Buzz: Leverage social media as a way to have attendees opt-in for information to stay up-to-date on the conference to build buzz and excitement. You can accomplish this through Tweets, Facebook posts, and text alerts to make them more attractive than email blasts.
3. Connect: Create communities to allow participants to start building connections and start networking with fellow attendees before they arrive. This can be accomplished through setting up specific groups within channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.  Determine where your audience is already connecting and join them there.
4. Conversations: Make it easy for participants to connect with speakers through their social media channels. Print their LinkedIn, Twitter handles, and/or blog URLs on everything.  Encourage speakers to connect with attendees beforehand.  
5. Hashtags: Create a hashtag – a word preceded by the “#” that is used to link your post to other posts on the same subject – for the event. This will allow for tweets about your event to be easily searched and organized.
6. Blogging: Create a blog on your site to allow for updates on information about the event.  Encourage speakers to contribute before the event. Solicit feedback from users.

During the Event

1. Live tweeting: Put the power of the event into the participants’ hands. Encourage them to use the event hashtag to tweet about the event while it’s happening. Monitor the tweets and pull in questions to respond dynamically.
2. Reward Participation: Consider a raffle or giveaway during the conference, with attendees receiving one entry for each tweet they post during a particular segment of the event. Keep it fresh and retweet powerful comments, questions or ideas to spur conversation.
3. Live Photos: Encourage participants to share pictures from the event. Have a Flickr page dedicated to it. Pull photos into your event blog.
4. Interactions: Plug comments from the floor, from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn into your event webpage, allowing attendees to participate in telling the story of your event to those who cannot be there live.
5. Questions: Take live questions from the floor, using Twitter, Facebook, text, or email.
6. Webcasting: Consider streaming the event live on your website to build a larger cadre of virtual attendees who are participating from their office or home.

After the Event

It’s imperative that you don’t let the conversation end. Leverage the groups and blog you have set up to continue the dialogue. Post comments from the event. Feature participants’ thoughts or ideas about the event.

1. Share Comments: Comment on or retweet information from participants.
2. Distribute: Make materials available and encourage dialogue from participants.
3. Plan: Start planning for next year’s event. Seek out participants, speakers, etc.
4. Survey: Facilitate feedback from attendees to help shape future events.

Conclusions

It’s important – as with all social media – to clearly measure what worked and what did not. There are tools that allow you to measure the conversation happening before, during and after the event.  Use these tools to help dynamically shape the event  as it is running, as well as in planning your future events. Also, use opportunities to find connection points with participants to be able to communicate with them after the event. Follow up with surveys to solicit feedback – but make sure to keep the questions short, meaningful and relevant to the attendee’s experience.

You’ll find exciting, first-hand stories to share with your customers. You’ll find fresh, real-time feedback, and you’ll benefit from more engaged participants. And following the event, you will have a vehicle to carry authentic interactions forward to build relationships.