Event Marketing
May 13, 2014  •  by Jane Carter

How To Manage On-site Social Media At Your Event

How To Manage On-site Social Media At Your Event From keeping your speakers happy to making sure the food layout is just right, there are an endless number of things for an event organizer to worry about the day of the event. With so much going on, it’s easy to neglect one of the most important pieces of your event: the on-site social media! Lets talk about how to mange on-site social media at your event. Whether you’re hosting a conference, fundraiser, concert or anything in between, on-site social media is a crucial piece of promotion and attendee engagement, both of which are vital to the overall experience of your event. To help you manage your on-site social media, we offer a few recommendations to ensure your online social interaction runs smoothly without distracting you from keeping your event on track. ______________________________________________________

1. Hand off social media duties

Managing the on-site social media for an event demands your complete attention. Since your attention will, rightfully, be focused on ensuring a smooth event, leave the social media duties to a member of your team and make sure that that is their only responsibility for the event. Days before the event, be sure to go over a social media strategy with this team member and make sure you’re both on the same page as far as what is okay and not okay to post. If there are specific parts of the event you want highlighted in your social media coverage, make sure your helper knows where to be and when to cover those highlights.

2. Interact constantly

Managing an event’s social media demands complete attention because it requires constant interaction and conversation with your attendees, speakers, vendors and anybody else involved with or interested in the event. Your social media manager should always be on the look out for people talking about the event using keywords, hashtags and other identifiers. If the conversation is slow, it’s your manager’s job to ask questions, post interesting photos and more to spark engagement. Showing strong and constant g interest in your attendees via social media engenders trust and loyalty and leads to a better overall event experience.

3. Designate an official #hashtag & monitor it

Since Twitter is so widely used and one of the easiest social mediums to interact instantly on, I recommend you make it one of the main platforms you operate on. One of the best aspects of Twitter is the hashtag functionality, which lets you categorize tweets by a keyword of your choosing. Before you set up your marketing for your event, designate a catchy hashtag for your event (examples: #PartyCon2014, #GoLocalFest, etc) and encourage people to tweet using that hashtag. This will make it easy for your guests to talk online and painless for your manager to find tweets about the event and interact with fans and followers on the day of the event.

4. Encourage speakers, bands, etc to do the same

If you have other attractions at your event, it’s often helpful to provide a hashtag from each of those as well. That way, when people talk on Twitter, their tweets can stay relevant to a specific topic instead of falling into a giant pool of general tweets about the event. Having hashtags for “events within the event” also help your social media manager separate and categorize the various conversations going on. Rather than have to sort through a thousand tweets with a generic hashtag, he or she can target tweets and engage with only a particular segment of your attendees, ensuring a more relevant and engaging conversation.

5. Seek feedback & mind manners

Don’t be afraid to ask people on social media for their feedback on your event! While some might argue this is an easy way to open yourself up to criticism, a savvy organizer will see this as an opportunity to improve the event and create an even better experience. Your attendees will be impressed that you cared to ask for their opinion and even more impressed you actually did something with it. Along with seeking feedback, social media managers should be sure to say thank you to attendees, speakers and vendors when the event ends. This is great way to garner some goodwill and put a nice cap on your event. Feel free to include photos, albums, quotes and more in your thank you tweets and posts as well to increase the odds of them getting shared. ______________________________________________________ These are just a few of the countless ways to stay on top of your social media during your event. More than anything, the conversations and interactions online should begin before your event and extend well beyond. This is the best way to create a sense of loyalty and community amongst your fans and keep them constantly coming back for more.  ]]]]> ]]>