The process of generating ideas for a launch of a product can be stressful as well as exciting. The primary reason for designing an item is to make it sell. To sell products, they have to be easily accessible to potential buyers. The main challenge is to figure out how to achieve this.
Marketing and PR firms are using social media as an important medium for promoting their products. The reason is that the popularity of social media is a perfect platform for innovative products to enter.
Methods to Utilize Social Media to Generate Excitement for Events
It doesn’t matter if you’re planning an annual gathering or a small business event; there are plenty of ways that social media can create a memorable event.
Let’s look at how social media has changed the event plan landscape, bringing more people involved in your event.
1. Engage
One of the most effective ways to get attendees involved in the beginning is to facilitate feedback or crowdsourcing of the conference’s program. An excellent example is South by Southwest and their PanelPicker process.
PanelPicker serves as the official SXSW user-generated session-proposal platform that allows the public to propose ideas for the conference’s programming. PanelPicker makes available 30 % of program choices to interested attendees.
Another method to get feedback from your customers is via polls. This could be as easy as polls on Twitter, Google Form, or services specifically for votes.
2. Intrigue
Most events have an official web website. However, only a few (except for geek events) use the event listings for free and event management possibilities. At a minimum, create event pages for:
- Facebook Events
Eventbrite (where you can sell tickets, should you be inclined)
- LinkedIn (if it’s a business occasion)
It’s inconvenient to manage all these pages for events; however, your attendees will be across various pools. Furthermore, every conference has one MVP attendee, someone who goes by the name of Google. Why would you pass up an opportunity to double, triple, or quadruple your search engine results?
3. Share
If you’re launching a brand new product or company, getting your message out there is a difficult task marketers must tackle. An effective method of attracting customers is to start an advertising campaign that teases them, and it’s a powerful tool to capture viewers’ attention and increase anticipation.
To make it work, discover the platforms suitable for your product and ensure you are active. Additionally, the email marketing feature will let you share more information.
4. Energize
When the date of your event draws closer, you’ll want to convince people away from the fence and convince them to attend the event. Social Media Examiner accomplishes this by regularly revealing what guests will likely experience during their annual conference leading to the event. They also share the speakers they are scheduled to speak on and any interesting panels scheduled for presentation.
Meet up and discuss with your speakers about creating teaser content. Many speakers already write regularly-scheduled content for their audiences, and they can work with you to help promote the occasion.
Ensure you’re actively promoting the hashtag for your event and inviting participants to share their posts via Twitter or Instagram. You can create momentum and establish personal connections with your guests by engaging with attendees before the event gets underway.
5. Integrate
We’re now talking about the experience on-site that’s where social media can make a difference and help get people talking. Choose a hashtag for your event so that attendees and remote viewers can track their activity on Twitter.
The shorter, the better, please. Begin your conference with an informal Twitter-up. This will get your potential creators of content excited and motivated.
I’m not a huge fan of the geek-related conference feature of life, streaming Twitter walls in front of speakers as they talk. Too distracting. But, I like the idea of having a large Twitter wall at the central location of a conference. It’s a simple task currently, with something similar to Tweetwally.
Additional Ways to Create Buzz
Propagate
Make your media for the occasion. With Ustream (and its incredible iPhone application), it was streaming live videos from your event at no cost. Why would you not?
Create an official Flickr gallery to promote the event and invite participants to take pictures and upload photos to the gallery. Prizes will be awarded for the best Photo of the Day.
Create a podcast every day after a show by interviewing sponsors, speakers, and event attendees. Or, you can atomize the audio further and create tweets by combining sound and audio using Twaud.io.
Hashtagging It
The on-site experience is where social media can create a buzz and make people talk. Select a hashtag for your event so that attendees can follow the event on Twitter as well as Instagram. More concise hashtags are preferred. Make sure that the hashtag will last long after the event has ended.
For instance, each year, the Life is Beautiful concert festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, is an important event that fans worldwide attend. For 2018, the concert’s hashtag is #LifeIsBeautiful2018. But the alternative hashtag used throughout the year-round is #LifeIsBeautiful. With an old-fashioned hashtag, this allows people to make use of it throughout the year, which makes it more pertinent.
Inform
At the time of the event, you can invite participants to give opinions about the session for real-time feedback. It is possible to use an application known as Yapp that allows guests to vote in the app that will be used for the event duration. It’s also a great method to inform attendees of announcements and contests during the event.
This is a superior method to sending the survey following the event to ask attendees what they thought of the program. This way, participants can vote immediately after the session ends by using their mobile phones.
Aggregate
Use the conference’s content to disseminate it as widely as you can. The goal is to convince those who weren’t there this year to read the conference content and decide to come back next year.
Make sure you take every presentation from the conference. Instead of posting them on your site or sending links to attendees, make them available via SlideShare (one every day for maximal impact). Create content from key events during the conference to share small bits of content on social media.
Conclusion
Give prizes to quality content. Ask attendees to submit their most memorable quote or image from the conference to be entered to win a subscription to a software program from a sponsor or a free registration for the next meeting. It’s also a great opportunity to advertise to sponsors and encourage them to join in future events.