SOCIAL MEDIA - building communities online

 WRITTEN BY SILVIA FERRARI AND RASMUS FORSSEN

Main source: Challis, J. (2015). Using Digital Marketing To Promote Your Event. Retrieved March 05, 2018, from https://www.koozai.com/blog/content-marketing-seo/using-digital-marketing-to-promote-your-event/

Increasing brand awareness and loyalty, improving quality and effectiveness of sales, improving ROO and leading the industry from a social media perspective has become a must in the past few years for event professionals.

Photo by Tracy Le Blanc from Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/apple-applications-apps-cell-phone-607812/

Hashtags, influencers, tagging, re-posting and user-generated content are tools that are key in building communities online, engaging them and enhancing their experience even months before they enter the “gates” of an event.

How do you capture your attendee’s willingness to participate in an event? Creating the “buzz” using digital marketing is the answer J. Challis gives. He identifies in his article “Using Digital Marketing To Promote Your Event” crucial steps and tools in the creation of online “social” communities in the world of events using digital marketing: Website, Content Marketing, Social Media, Search Engine Optimization, Paid ads, Email marketing campaigns and Ticket Management. He follows an event life cycle and underlines the importance of using those tools continuously before, during and after the event.

How do you manage these concretely? We had a look at one of those aspects, managing social media and creating communities pre-event, and observed how the international Berliner trade show ITB was active online between 2017-18 to promote the ITB 2018 edition.

ITB is present on various platforms (see table below) and has its biggest community of followers on Facebook (around 44 000). Most users on Facebook are between 18-49, mostly women from the US, India, Brazil, Mexico etc.[1]. We noticed that ITB posts once to twice a day (the closer the event, the more often it appears on the newsfeed) mainly in English and in some cases in German. It addresses different stakeholders through the platform (bloggers, event planners, media partners). However, the response from the audience is low.
In our opinion it is not only a matter of choosing the right keywords, the social media activity needs to be engaging, informative and interactive – as Challis states. How? Boosting the posting, giving attendees incentives to share their experience online through prize-winning for instance, installing “photo booths” at the event and encouraging them to leave their feedback during and after the event.

C -- Collaboration (Collaborate, don’t control -- remember that your brand story is getting shaped by your community and not just yourself)
O -- Openness (Be open and transparent in what you do)
M -- Mediation (Don’t antagonize, mediate when you run into crises)
M -- Magnetic (You need to be magnetic and charismatic to inspire your community to greater and better things)
U -- Utilitarian (Reflect useful and practical content your community can identify with)
N -- Nice (if you’re not nice, it won’t pay back)
I -- Integrity (Integrity should anchor your actions or your community will sniff you out)
T -- Tact (Be respectful, show some tact, don’t type what you will regret)
Y -- Yield (Your brand should put the yield of your community above the yield the brand might get)”[2]

No audiences but online communities of quality are valuable and worth investing into.

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[1] Source: 2016 – see https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-marketing-strategy/

[2] Christel Quek, previous Regional Content Lead at Twitter. See: https://www.postplanner.com/expert-advice-how-to-grow-vibrant-online-community/

[3] Source: 2016 – see https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-marketing-strategy/