Tweets, likes, follows, and replies: do you know how to leverage the many social media tools of the trade for your event marketing efforts? In this event marketing series, we’ll will give you the best practices needed to build engagement and event awareness with your attendees on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
In the first post in our event marketing series, we’ll teach you Twitter best practices that will help elevate your event marketing efforts beyond 140 characters. These tips and tricks will deepen your engagement before, during and after your event to help boost your ROI.
Twitter Best Practices
Twitter is a great platform for a myriad of things: keeping up with the news, tracking industry leaders (or Hollywood celebrities), but most of all, it’s a powerful, all-in-one social media marketing tool. If you’re currently not including Twitter in your event marketing strategy, here’s a fact that might change your mind. Twitter boasts 288 million monthly active users, with an average over 500 million posts being sent each day. With these numbers in mind, here are a few Twitter tricks of the trade to keep top of mind when marketing your next event.
Track It with a Hashtag
Hashtags, when used properly, can boost awareness and engagement for your event in a unique and powerful way. At the heart of the hashtag is a way to identify groups of messages happening around a particular subject. Tweets with one to two hashtags receive two times more engagement than those without so using the appropriate hashtags can you get substantial mileage in your event marketing efforts.
To make sure you get the most bang for your hashtag, create a unique hashtag before your event to build awareness. Hashtag Generator can help you formulate a simple event hashtag against just a few words or phrase. If you have a hashtag in mind, make sure it isn’t already associated with another event with a handy tool called Tagboard. If the hashtag is already in use, Tagboard gives suggestions for related keywords which you can incorporate into your hashtag. Once you have your event hashtag selected, it’s time to put it to good use!
Tracking your hashtag’s engagement is easy to do with free tools like TweetDeck and Hootsuite. Both programs function like a command center for your Twitter account to track engagement against individual users, keywords, and more importantly, hashtags. Best of all, both tools are free. By homing in on the event hashtag, you’re able to get up to the minute updates on the conversations happening around your event.
Use an event hashtag to start a conversation about your event
Click To Tweet
The music festival South by Southwest uses #sxsw2015 organically in their tweets. By using a hashtag specific to the year, they can track the engagement for tweets from that year which could help them set social goals for the following year.
The good folks at @CommunionMusic are bringing another showcase to ATX for #SXSW2015. Check out the lineup:
— SXSW (@sxsw) February 24, 2015
Dot rule
When you tweet directly to someone via a @mention, the tweet will show up in two places: your own feed and in the feeds of only the followers you both have in common. But what if you want to get your tweets in front of all of your followers? There’s a little known secret to tweeting that can help get your messaging in front of more people and it’s as easy as using a period. By putting a period in front of the @mention when the mention is at the beginning of your tweet, it will be seen by all of your followers, not simply those who follow you and those that follow the @mention. In this example, by using the period in front of @Slidoapp, this tweet will be seen by all of Social Tables’ followers in addition to the followers who also happen to follow Sli.do. By not putting the period in front of @Slidoapp, it would be perceived as a Twitter conversation between Sli.do and Social Tables. By using just a simple dot, you’re getting messaging in front of exponentially more eyeballs.
.@Slidoapp‘s @Juraj_Holub gives us 20 ideas for content creation at your live #event: pic.twitter.com/s8bWgIJzxN — Social Tables (@socialtables) February 23, 2015
Be a Conversation Starter
Using an event hashtag is a great way to find relevant conversations happening about your event, thank attendees for coming or providing a way to solicit feedback, positive or negative, on your event. Whatever the case may be, you should aim to be the event’s conversation starter on Twitter.
Tweets about your event will provide an invaluable opportunity to learn more about your attendees, exhibitors and sponsors. What are they most excited about? What do they find the most value-add at your event? If you find attendees are asking a lot of questions about logistics, reply promptly and make it a point to tweet must-know information about your event before hand and reference the event hashtag. Will you have a high-profile keynote speaker at your event? Build excitement about the speaking engagement via Twitter by dropping clues as a few weeks before the event with a big reveal via Twitter or simply announcing the speaker via tweet.
Join the movement for a better event. Try Social Tables today.
We’re excited to have @bravotopchef star and @VibianaEvents partner @NealFraser on our lineup for #CSES2015!
— Catersource (@Catersource_llc) December 11, 2014
Even if an event is over, attendees will continue to tweet about it. Take this opportunity to solicit feedback and takeaways from your followers or event attendees using the event hashtag. Getting feedback directly from attendees will help you to shape your event for the following year.
Up next: sad goodbyes and a celebration of the 2015 #cased1 at the closing reception. What’s your biggest takeaway? — CASE DI Conference (@CASEdIConf) January 30, 2015
Get Organized with Twitter Lists
Ever wonder who is tweeting about your event? Wouldn’t you like to meet them or find out if they’ll be in attendance the following year? A great way to organize your attendees, exhibitors and supporters in one area is through a Twitter list.
For The Special Event (TSE) 2015, we wanted to track those that attended. By doing a simple search against the event hashtag, #TSE2015, we found the handles that used the hashtag. To add each person to the list, click on their handle, click the gear, then create a new list for the event and the year. If we want to tweet to previous attendees directly, the Twitter list is one of the best ways to do that.
After you’ve added all the handles you’d like to include on your list, you can easily access your lists from your own Twitter page. From there, you can see the list members’ tweet activity to monitor conversations relevant to your event in one central area.
Have any other Twitter tips or tricks to share? Tweet them to @socialtables!
Stay tuned for part two of our Event Marketing Series, Instagram Best Practices.
The post Marketing Your Event: Twitter Best Practices appeared first on The Social Tables Blog.
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