Social Media for Events, How to Do it & Do it Well

If used correctly, social media networks help event planners to better understand their target makets as well as to engage attendees prior, during and after the event.  Through this excitement and the buzz around the event can be prolonged.

However, different strategies have to applied pre, during and post to the happening.

Identify your audience

It is vital to know who will be attending your event. Different social media channels are more appropriate than others in order to reach your audience. As can be seen in the chart below Twitter is seen as the best ways to reach attendees that come from around the globe e.g tradeshows. Facebook is a great way to engage attendees when organizing a B2C ever.

Monitoring tools

Updating and monitoring your social media networks might be very time consuming. Therefore, it is a must to use tools such TweetDeck, Hootsuite and Commun.it to automate processes, schedule posts and follow your hastags.

Content of your posts

Do not abuse online networks to spam your followers with information about your own event. Provide an added value to your audience by including posts about industry news, publications of key leaders, tips etc.

During the event

This is the time when online activity will be most active. As an event organizer you have to make sure that someone is dedicated to post updates and react to both positive and negative comments. Immediate feedback from attendees can help to not only improve the event in the future but also to adapt the current program.

After the event

By keeping content alive people who could not attend the congress are able to be informed about what was going on. Posts can include interviews, photos, conference proceedings and the like.

Measurement

Doing all this however makes only sense if ROI is measured afterwards. Analytics regarding follower growths, number of shares, engagement rates and influencers are only some of the tools that can be used.

To conclude, it is vital to plan social media and use it to nourish your audience with content that is relevant to them.

Source:

Carvalho. (April, 2014). Social media for events, how to do it & do it well. Retrieved April 11, 2014 from http://evvnt.com/2014/04/social-media-events-well/

Pictures: 

http://evvnt.com/2014/04/social-media-events-well/

By Agathe Domenach and Anja Gunz