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Social media brings along with it a fantastic boon when it comes to planning an event whether big or small. Here are some of the useful tips on how to utilize the social media as a powerful tool in making an event successful. Social media can be used very relevantly to promote the event few days prior to the event, to provide updates and publish coverage during the course of the event and finally publishing the post-event activities. If you religiously follow the bits of the advice discussed here, you may very easily attract new and engaged prospects as well as build awesome loyalty with the existing clients and customers.
Pre-event Promotion
1. The first and foremost duty is to create a website, a single webpage or a blog as your anchor for the concerned event. You will have to ideally send all the links to this particular URL.
2. Using Meetup.com helps a lot if yours is a live event. This is a fantastic site that can be searched as per location and subject category. Using this portal will surely help building attendance to your event.
You can also use other website like Doattend & eventzilla
3. Using Twitter and tweeting frequently and consistently is very necessary. Six weeks well in advance prior to the event, you might tweet 2-3 times per week as you get closer to the concerned event. It would be great if you can tweet several times in a day. It would be wise if you really increase the frequency of tweeting the day before and on the day of the event. This is to be strictly kept in mind that you vary your tweets talking about different aspects of the contents of the event.
4. It is wise to blog about your event with at least 2-3 posts before the starting of the event. The strategy is to talk about the speakers, topic & overall contents of the event and how the attendees immensely benefit out of the event.
5. You can create “Events” with Facebook and LinkedIn. After that you may email about the event to as many contacts as possible using the social media. Also it is crucial that you remind your contacts about the upcoming event again closer to the actual date.
6. Also post the event in the Discussions section of all relevant groups in LinkedIn and also on the discussion section in Facebook. Those walls should be updated on regular basis with more and more relevant info on the event in order to keep up the readers’ interest.
7. Also there are certain event announcement sites like Eventbrite.com, Eventful.com etc. in order to promote your date and time of your event.
Participants’ engagement during the course of the event
1. It is suggested to have the keynote speaker or kick-off speaker incorporate references to the Twitter hash tags, Facebook page and blog for the event.
2. At the venue of the event, use the signage and printed program in order to promote Social Media aspect of the event among the visitors and guests.
3. Set up an event-specific blog or wiki for the purpose of posting updates while the event is going on (this would be a purely informative page and would be different from your promotional blog or other promotional pages).
4. It would be wise to create a Twitter hash tag in order to aggregate the comments and very actively engage the attendees with each other. This would give the attendees a platform to ventilate their views and reviews that they have witnessed and experienced after attending the event in person.
5. It is extremely crucial to cover the event with live blogging, tweeting video and podcasts from the event floor. In case you do not have the required and skillful manpower for this purpose, you may consider hiring a specialized social media agency to perform this duty successfully.
6. It is extremely necessary to get feedbacks throughout by engaging the visitors and guests with all social media posts and comments soon after they appear. It is also useful to create a true dialogue with the attendees.
Post event coverage utilizing Social Media
1. As we all remember from our sales training that the secret is nothing other than follow-ups. Ensure that you contact all registrants with proper and courteous follow-up offers for downloads, white papers, special offers, podcasts and speakers’ books. You should do all the stuffs in social media in order to keep the attendees interested and engaged even after the event. The motive is to popularize the event and spread the word of mouth even after the event is over.
2. Also do not forget to invite the registrants to sign up for your company’s Facebook page, to register for your blog and sign up for your newsletter, inviting to connect them on Twitter and everything to keep the connection ongoing.
3. After the event is over, follow up multiple times at regular intervals with the registrants in order to keep the relationship going.
If you follow through all the stages of the event with strategic and creative use of Social Media, then your event would certainly be well-attended and talked about even after the event is over.
