Summer has established itself as the prime season for hosting events, making it essential to fully leverage social media management. Social media has transformed not only how events are marketed but also how attendees interact with brands and influencers involved. Fostering a dialogue between the event and the attendees is a key step to ensure maximum attendance, excitement, and engagement.
Event curators have been adopting a rise in social media trends to boost engagement. Making a special hashtag for an event has become a common practice for organizers to connect with their audience as they post pictures and videos on different social media sites. However, such prompts only work well when the management is consistent, which is where many organizers struggle.
Staying active in regards to social media while the event is ongoing isn’t always easy, but it’s an incredibly important part in engaging attendees. Whatever method you decide to use during your event, creating interaction with your audience in real time can truly benefit the promotional goal. Here are 3 ways to use social media management to help propel engagement when hosting an event.
Constantly Monitor Social Media Activity
Make sure to have someone continually tracking posts coming from the location of your event. The beauty of people using an event hashtag is that they are willingly promoting a brand to their unique set of followers. However, this only works when the hashtag is used properly. If you find great posts from the event that aren’t tagged, reply to the user in a comment and say something like “great post” and include the hashtag. Not only does this prompt others to use the hashtag for future posts, it also gives users a sense of human-centered marketing, which is beneficial to creating relationships with audiences.
Think Outside Of The Box
One of the main goals of a promotional event is to prompt attendees to participate in social media conversation whether it be by sharing, commenting, or tagging friends. One of the most effective ways to galvanize this type of engagement is through interactive content, which can be employed by utilizing a creative avenue untapped by competitors. Whichever route you choose to get your audience to interact, one surefire way to increase engagement is to incentivize attendees to create their own piece of content through the means of something like a contest.
Use User-Generated Content To Your Advantage
Many event attendees will only have a fraction of the followers in comparison to the organizer’s social media presence, which makes the idea of their content being shared with a larger audience exciting for them. This can be boosted through influencer marketing by having various influencers either onsite at the event creating and sharing content, or offsite sharing content created by people who are there onsite.
Sharing pictures, videos or text blurbs from attendees during the event will undeniably benefit the interaction between the event and the guests present. Utilizing something like a unique hashtag to filter posts relevant to either the event or brand and repurposing the content only expands your ability to market to your target audience.
Events can be a great way to create brand awareness and create loyal followers, but the necessary steps in social media management are necessary to get optimal results. Remaining active on social media throughout the event’s duration, using creative incentives to promote social media conversation, and repurposing user-generated content will help increase engagement significantly.