Social Media Event Marketing: A How-To-Guide

If we’ve seen it once, we’ve seen it 10,000 times – a brand with every reason to succeed, every opportunity to execute an amazing event, but lacking the vision to “socially” optimize it. Deloitte University Press’s report on social trends for 2014 states, “Digital outreach should be paired with traditional in-store or on-site campaigns, delivering on the potential of seamless, omni-channel digital engagement.” We couldn’t agree more.

At the Everywhere Agency, we love nothing more than helping our clients take a traditional event and create social media reverberation around it. Below, we’ve outlined a few tricks of the trade for turning your boring old event into a social media success story. A ‘Social Media Event Marketing How-To’ - if you will.

Pre-Event Social Activation:

• Go Where Your Audience Is: Is your event geared toward teens and young adults? Millennial Women? Parents? (Almost) everyone is on social, sure, but where you can find your audience’s corner of the social sphere is a bit more involved. Here’s a shortcut: according to a recent 2014 Pew study, you’re most likely to find teens and young adults on Instagram, millennial women on Pinterest, both men and women looking for quick info on Twitter, men on LinkedIn, and unsurprisingly, most everyone on Facebook. This should act as a baseboard for where you will promote your event.
• Don’t Just Post – Target: It’s not enough to generically advertise that your company is hosting a marketing conference in Kalamazoo on LinkedIn. Think about who you want there, be geographically realistic and make sure your paid promotion reflects that. If not targeted correctly, your budget could be spent in two hours by the entirely wrong demographic.

Live Social Activation:

Create On-Site Social Opportunities for Sharing Content:

1. ‘Instagram Photo Booths’ - Invite attendees to pose in front of a branded banner with props. Have an event rep take photos of guests and encourage them to post their photos to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. with an event specific hashtag. Incentivize attendees by offering a prize to those who participate.
2. Social Scavenger Hunt – When brands host in-house events, it’s an opportunity for guests to share their experience and interact with products. The best way to accomplish this is through a social scavenger hunt, whereby attendees participate by locating a number of items. In order for their submissions to count, however, they must share photos of each item via their social channels mentioning your brand’s @handle and the event hashtag. Not only does this put product in attendees’ hands, it’s shareable social content that’s visual. Not to mention, it’s an interactive activity for those who like to participate and not just observe.
3. Twitter Chats – These events pose ideal opportunities to share images and info about your event with those who can’t make it. They can - and should - run concurrently with your physical event. Talk about building buzz around your brand, sharing your event with a variety of markets, and exercising an efficient, affordable means of crowdsourcing customer opinion. Don’t underestimate the power of group conversation when it comes to social crowdsourcing – embrace it!

Live & Post-Event Digital Activation:

• Digital Reviews – Encourage attendees to share their experience with the digital community. Be it Google Places, Yelp or simply a customer testimonial that your brand can use for future promotion, entice your attendees to share. Event reps can walk around the event with tablets and ask attendees to participate. What makes this so important long term is the online rating your brand will have for weeks, months - maybe even years - to come from SEO. Consider it the free gift that keeps on giving. *It’s important to note that this should only be a suggestion and, ethically speaking, must be free of any incentive or compensation.

BONUS: “The Doozy” = Pre, Live & Post-Event Social Activation:

• Third Party Participation: Arguably, the best kind of promotion is courtesy of unbiased third parties. Identify local, digital influencers and invite them to attend your event as social correspondents. While their tweets may not live long beyond the date of your event, their blog articles written with proper SEO strategy and Google+ posts will secure your brand increased and prolonged searchability.

Whatever you do for your next event, make sure you take into consideration at least a handful of our suggestions – you can thank us later.

Or you can just hire us to do it for you. That always works too.