9 Ways To Boost Your Events Social Media Engagement

9 Ways To Boost Your Events Social Media Engagement

By May 3, 2016 May 7th, 2019 Uncategorized
For event marketing, social media has become a crucial role in planning and executing a successful event. Utilizing these platforms to create event engagement creates a community amongst your attendees and gives them the opportunity to interact with your brand. When done correct, you can increase your brand’s value and improve engagement metrics by implementing an effective social media marketing campaign for your next event. Inspired by the webinar done by product marketing manager at Cvent, Kevin Yanushefski and Emily Vera, I wanted to summarize their points for you. I enjoyed reading them and I hope you do as well. Enjoy!

Create An Engaging Event Hashtag

Hashtags hold an increasing amount of significance throughout social media platform. Active users browse hashtags relevant to their needs, meaning your hashtag needs to incorporate your target audience. An engaging event hashtag needs to be unique, short and memorable. With only 140 characters for a tweet, your hashtag needs to provide a key message for your audience to takeaway. Research sites such as, hashtagify.me and hashtags.org, can ensure your hashtag is not being used by another event. If you are holding a recurring event, use a hashtag that can be reused year after year. This increases the hashtags exposure and can exponentially build your following over time.

Hold Contests Through Social Media

Every target audience has a need that you have to meet in order to stay successful. Creating a contest with goods and services that align with your audience is an excellent way to let people interact with your brand. Cvent praises simple gifts for your campaign, like mobile charges, selfie sticks and tote bags. Don’t give away money or discounts, offer prizes that can improve the overall event experience for attendees.

Attract Adult Audiences

The idea that “social media is for my kids” has become a thought of the past. Statistics have shown that social media is increasingly reaching older audiences. Want to engage an older audience? Create a network where they can be educated on the newest trends of social media. Teach people how to share a viral tweet, or utilize high volume hashtags on Instagram. Reward attendees for their social media success by features, prizes or a simple shout out.

Encourage Social Participation Onsite

You can encourage onsite social media participation in a non-invasive manner. Begin by subtly integrating social media into every aspect of the event. During the registration process, collect social media handles so they appear on attendee name badges. For presentations, make sure your event hashtag is at the bottom of every slide. This will get attendees to discuss on their phones, discussing the event with colleagues and generating more traffic to the feed.

Active Social Media Engagement

Engagement is the key to growing a social media network. When you get users involved in the networks, they are more likely to share your content with their friends and colleagues. This tactic is a two way street, you need to engage as well. You can do this by starting conversations with attendees who like and comment on your posts. Respond with a question for them, as well as other attendees can answer. Use an onsite tool, like SocialWall, to display social media posts and inspire attendees by showing them their colleagues are using social media at the event.  

Keep The Event Alive

Just because the event is over, doesn’t mean the social media engagement needs to be. Keep the momentum going by slowly releasing content related to the event. Recall on key points from a popular presentation, link to third-party press your event received, and create buzz for next years event. Ask for feedback. Creating a place for people to leave feedback lets them feel a part of the event as well as helps you improve on next years. Respond fast. Users expect a response on social media within 60 minutes.

Manage Event Posts

There is no magic number for the best amount of posts you should share with your audience for optimal event engagement. Each social media platform has a different number of daily posts as well as times for doing so. Be careful to not spam your followers with too much content. Boosting every post on Facebook has an adverse effect on engagement. Increase post frequency and enhanced posts as the event date gets closer. After the event, decrease the amount of posts but don’t let the conversation die out. Respond accordingly to what your audience is engaging in. Read more about scheduling your social media posts at CosSchedule

Use Valued Social Media Metrics

Which social media metrics are most important depends on what your boss cares about! Seriously, value metrics depends on your organization and the types of events you hold. Most commonly, your applause rate and conversation rate are the most important metrics. These two metrics provide you insight on how your content is performing within your audience. As they improve, your impressions grow and ultimately, your conversions grow with them.

Maximum Impact, Minimal Time

Content is king. The best way to impact your audience in a short period of time is by creating unique content that converts. Be honest, be real and be casual. No one wants to read formal business letters all the time. Users connect and respond to the human elements of a post rather than a sales promotion or a robot. The more you engage with your followers as yourself, the more impact you’ll have throughout your social media networks.  
Aurice Guyton

Author Aurice Guyton

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