Creating a LinkedIn Group for Effective Event Management

Social media are becoming important in the event industry. An increasingly number of event managers is thinking about promoting events through social media.

Why social media are useful when advertising events? Why event managers should think more about these ways of promoting their events? This is what we are going to learn this month with an article called “Creating a LinkedIn Group for Effective Event Management”, written by Kate Oxton and published on Ezine Articles Website on September 9, 2010.

Social media are an alternative solution for event planners to promote their events. Websites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are free to use, easy to use, reach a large network of people and are less expensive than any other advertising campaigns such as poster campaigns.
In this article, the author focuses on LinkedIn. Kate Oxton explains in details how to advertise an event on LinkedIn through five steps:

1. Create a LinkedIn group. A LinkedIn group is quick and easy to create. Participants of an event have to find the group easily. Keywords have to be used for the name of the group, and if the event has a logo, it should be used to represent the LinkedIn group.

2. Build up a small membership base. Delegates are not going to join the group if there is no member! Event managers have to invite a few people from their own network to join the group and encourage them to start talking together on LinkedIn to show that the group is active.

3. Promote the group. Once the group is created and has a few participants, it is time to promote it on the event Website, through newsletters, on blogs and other social media networks.

4. Ask industry leaders to join the group. For example, if key speakers are participating in the event, they should join the group. They are important people in the industry and are able to increase credibility of delegates who are hesitating joining the group.

5. Manage the LinkedIn group. Like any other social media, the author advises to manage the group closely on a regular basis: create a lot of interactions between members through discussions, news, information about the event, etc.

As future event planners, we have to be aware of new technologies that are affecting the industry. This article is relevant. It explains like a cookery book how to benefit from a professional social media like LinkedIn to promote an event. However, we are not sure that a LinkedIn group is sufficient to promote an event. It depends on the target and on the size of the event.

The growing importance of IT tools in the event industry is creating new ways to plan, organize and advertise events. In this article we learnt how to promote events with social media. Next time we will look at another IT tool that affects the event industry.

Source : http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Kate_Oxton