Have you ever organised an event for your business?
It’s tough work!
One of the key success factors for your event is social media marketing and how you’ll be able to build engagement around your event hashtag. Your social media content plan for the event should cover three different stages:
- Before: Coming up with engaging content in the months leading to the event (announcing speakers, early bird ticket sales or invitations for free event, etc.)
- During: Publishing pre-planned content during the event (welcoming attendees, practical information, talking points from the presentations), and finally:
- After: Summarising the key points, highlighting the best images, and connecting with the most influential attendees (feedback and marketing your services and/or future events).
But like with any marketing activity, you shouldn’t just plan and create all the content yourself. Engaging colleagues, speakers, and attendees in creating content will help you to increase your event's reach and engagement on social media channels. The algorithms of Facebook and other social channels prioritise posts by individuals over businesses.
To give you an example, you could ask the event speakers to write a short blog post exploring the topic and theme they are planning to cover in the presentation – and then share that with the event hashtag. If you’ve set up a full website for the event, you can republish the blog posts too.
If writing a blog post feels like a big ask, then make sure you create shareable, event-branded pieces of content (e.g., an image with the presentation title and speaker profile photo) and distribute them with the speakers before the event.
Another great idea is to organise X (formerly Twitter) chats or Facebook Live interviews with speakers. If the speakers are from another organisation, you’ll be able to tap into the audiences of multiple companies.
Content published on social media channels shouldn't be exclusive to apps in our pockets – with the help of Flockler, you’ll be able to gather and display all event-related content on your marketing page, and display the posts on digital screens too. In addition to displaying social media feeds on any digital service, you’ll have a dashboard with KPIs (e.g. number of posts and total engagement) and lists of the most popular content and the most influential members of the audience.
Would you like to learn how to set up a social media wall for your event? Click the chat icon at the bottom of this page to organise a call with us or follow these 3 steps to set one up yourself:
- Create a unique event hashtag
- Set up a social media wall for your event marketing page - and digital screens
- Track the popularity of your hashtag and identify influencers
1. Create a unique event hashtag
Start by creating a unique hashtag for the event - you should choose a memorable hashtag that only shows content related to your event when people search for it. If your event name is quite generic, adding the year (#event2022) might make it easier to separate your content from other posts on social media channels. Keep it short and remember to add it to all your marketing materials from flyers to email signatures.
2. Set up a social media wall for your event marketing page - and digital screens
Why do event organisers create social media walls for their event's website pages and digital screens?
Leading up to the event, there are a few key reasons:
Firstly, most of them are keen to display all the buzz on social media channels to keep site visitors engaged for longer.
Secondly, the traffic your website drives to the featured social media posts will increase the number of likes, comments, and followers. It means that your content will reach a broader audience.
Thirdly, social media walls can display social media proof from speakers and attendees. Seeing enthusiastic comments from other people will increase your event sign-ups.
Finally, during the event, it’s important to highlight the best social media content of the participants on digital screens. Or if you are organising a virtual event, a live feed refreshing automatically on your website helps everyone to follow the conversation on social media channels. The comments can add value to presentations - and displaying a feed on digital screens encourages others to join the conversation too. The more people participate on social media channels, the more visibility and reach you get for your business.
Would you believe me if I said it only takes a few minutes to set up a social media wall for events and digital screens?
Start by signing up for our 14-day free trial and create automated feeds to gather posts by your account or mentioning your event hashtag.
After you’ve created feeds, you’ll be provided with different display options:
Share the embed code of the social wall with your favourite developer - and the social feeds will populate with fresh content on your marketing page.
With Flockler, you’ll get moderation options too: you can decide to store all the content for moderation, block usernames and keywords, and hide any content published automatically too.
The social wall works in any digital service but I prefer Slideshow for digital screens.
Below is an example from FIFA Museum, who welcome their visitors with a slideshow rotating the latest 15 social media posts.
3. Track the popularity of your hashtag and identify influencers
Social media isn’t just content, images, videos, and texts, distributed on websites. Social media has likes, comments, replies, retweets, and other interactions deeply ingrained. Together with the total amount of content, the engagement and reach of your content will determine if your social media marketing plan is a hit or miss.
With Flockler, you’re able to analyse and report on the total number of posts and their key engagement numbers. The data is automatically gathered in the background when your social wall is populated with fresh new content.
The lists of the most popular content and the most influential participants will help you to identify users and influencers whom you might want to contact with. Adding comments and reactions to top-performing posts will further increase the best posts' reach on social media channels – and show people that you appreciate their content.
After the event, your team might be interested in the most popular hashtags that were mentioned together with your event hashtag. The data will reveal the most popular topics and presentations of the day.
It all starts with a hashtag. Have you decided that yet?
