Friday, 3 February 2017

Addicted to social media??? Fabulous news for Event Organizers!


Social media and events have a common core goal of gathering people. This is what makes their collaboration very effective according to Corbin Ball, meetings technology expert. More and more event organizers use social media for the professional purposes and in the same time, social media is becoming more events oriented.
Facebook, leader of social network with 1,87 million active users per month (according to the Statistics Portal Statista of January 2017), without any doubts a great opportunity to make an event known and to attract more attendees. Facebook provides a clear guideline in order to create an event and proposes all needed tools to satisfy event organizers and its customers. Facebook offers to add keywords for an easy search for event, its API- Application Program Interface allows users to register for the event from Facebook. In addition, Facebook analyses users’ profiles and highlights events that could interest them. Moreover, Facebook has a possibility to make videos in live, what makes it even bigger competitor for Periscope, which also allows users to share an event experience though the live videos. Periscope is owned by Twitter, that helps to find a lot of information concerning an event through hashtags. Another successful social media for events is Snapchat, who was translating live stories of Olympic Games in Rio.
What is interesting to see is how social medias competing and collaborating between themselves. For example, Instagram, owned by Facebook, expands its options, firstly, by allowing putting longer videos, and then by creating “Stories” for those who want to make instant photos and live video what is very similar to Snapchat. Instagram also uses hashtags creating competition to Twitter. Periscope videos can be sent to Facebook page or YouTube to make it last longer than 24hours.
Nowadays, social media is used during the all three stages of events: before, during and after. It allows meeting planners to diffuse information to a huge number of people, it allow participants virtually attend an event and live the experience, and what is more, event planner can get feedbacks in order to improve it in the future.
Certainly, social medias wouldn’t have such a big value for events without all the number of people who actively use social media. Thus, the role of network externality is vital. Organizing events through social media is successful mainly thanks to the millennials, for whom “online” status is a part of the life. We never know what could happen in the next decades, will the role of social media grow or decline? But we know that being flexible and being able to adapt is necessary not only for the event industry but for the whole world!


Yana Ussenko 



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