A Guide To Using Social Media During Events

The creation of an exhibition is of great significance in a business’ life. It helps promote the business, enables relationships to be built and, most importantly, boosts sales. However without a successful social media strategy in place, elements such as these are unlikely to transpire. In the following guide, we’ll give you a few pointers on how utilise social medias to get the most valuable results from your exhibition and the attendees.

Choose Your Platform

With the vast amount of social media platforms available today, the choice of media platform for your event or even the generalities of daily life can be a bewildering one, to say the least. Generically, Instagram, Facebook or Twitter is a good place to start as they have such valuable statistics in terms of users and traffic; for example, Instagram has been named the most engaging net work with 150 million users and 16 billion photo’s shared. Whilst Instagram retains that title, networks such as Facebook have the highest engagement rate of any network. However, even when your platform choice is refined to these three famous examples, they all have very different purposes and are used for different reasons so you should be cautious when deciding which network you want to represent your event.

Alternatively, you could use multiple networks to represent your event. As is common in the world of social networking, entirely different groups of people use different networks for different reasons. With this in mind, you could utilize a number of different networks to target different groups with the same message. Limiting yourself to one network may be easier to maintain but may be fatal in terms of your strategy as, potentially, people may not follow your chosen network and won’t receive word of the event.

Post Post Post

Whether it’s a simple hash tag, a picture or an essay regarding your event, posting prior to the exhibition is key ingredient for success. You begin to build a following and spark interest in the event itself and not only does it enable you to gather potential interest in the event and thus attendees, but it also enables you to sell yourself. Create posts which make your company and event look notable and remember, the more intriguing and exciting the post, the more likely it is to spark interest and a following. Typically, people are looking for a reason to go to your event so by putting interesting posts, you will maximise the interest and the following of the event, this will increase the chances of people wanting to attend.

So you’ve successfully posted before the event and gained the interest of attendees and potential attendees; but why stop there? As well as posting prior to the event, you should post on your social networking platform during the event to maintain a positive and exciting look for your company and event. Not only will this help you promote the company and boost sales, but it will also continually spark interest in the event. Who knows, you may even change someone’s mind at the last minute.

Maintain And Respond

The most important part of utilizing social medias as a platform for your event is response. Simply, response is key. It makes the company look positive, caring and professional and improves the experience of the attendee or potential attendee by vast amounts. A quick and direct response can make the attendee feel a greater sense of community within the event and, on a personal level, can make them feel as if their opinion or query is being heard. This is important to the company or the event by improving the experience, in the mind of the attendee. Therefore, response over your social platform should be of highest priority.

However, the act of quick and direct response is unlikely to take place without correct maintance. As you can see the two are linked quite closely. Without maintance, response wouldn’t take place and vice versa. The key to success in any event is maintance and the same principle applies to the social networking aspect of the event. Therefore you should allocate people to the social networking side of the event and, most importantly, they should have the means to be able to respond to attendees at any given time. This will help to maintain the positivity experienced by the attendee’s and the positive reflection on your company and event.

Encourage Social Media Throughout

Your average good natured person would refrain from using their mobile device during an event out of respect for the speaker or event creators. Remember, you’re trying to promote the company and create interest in the event. Clarify during the event that it’s perfectly acceptable to use mobile devices to check in on social networking websites and you could even suggest networks for attendee’s to use.

Top Tip: Encourage attendee’s to take selfies at the event.

Create A Hashtag

The hashtag is undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools in modern social networking. Not only will it enable you to keep track of the conversations surrounding your event, it will also enable your attendee’s to create a community around your event in which they can share and post in a conjoined fashion. All the while, activity around your event is thriving and the excitement continues to reach new highs. The hashtag should be something short and memorable and if you’re successful in it’s creation, and people are using it, it will make the response to queries and questions quicker and it will build traffic and buzz surrounding your event.

Top Tip: Create the hashtag before your event. You can use it as promotion for your event and it begins to create interest before the event has even started. More importantly, by knowing before, people will know what to use whilst posting about the event.