How To Take Advantage Of Social Media At An Industry Conference Or Event
Social media is crucial these days. There are now close to 2.1 billion active social media accounts worldwide. It only makes sense that you would take advantage of social media to reach new fans and customers. We take our marketing very seriously at Follow My Vote and put a lot of time and effort into building a base of supporters. The best way to do this is through social media.
Attending an industry conference or event like DC TechDay can serve as a huge promotional opportunity on social media. You now have an event that you can talk about. This is also a prime opportunity to connect with new faces and companies. But to make the most of your attendance on social media, you have to have a plan.
Before the Event:
Begin with a plan and identify the key metrics you want to target. These can include website referral traffic, new followers, lead generations, fan engagement, blog engagement, and brand awareness. The next step? Set some goals. Maybe you want 50 new followers on twitter, or 100 new visitors to your site from Facebook. Someone smart once told me, you don’t plan to fail, but rather you fail to plan.
Let your fans know what event you will be attending and why. You can do this through social posts, or better yet, write a blog post and share it on your social media profiles. Get your fans and customers excited about your attendance. A little buzz around your brand always helps. You can expect to see a post on the Follow My Vote blog before we attend DC TechDay.
Find influencers and companies attending your event and tweet at them. It is important that there is synergy between you and the company you are reaching out to. For example we might tweet at Secure DB, another company attending DC TechDay that is involved in encryption. We use cryptographic protocols in our online voting platform, so we could easily tweet at them saying “@SecureDB come talk encryption with us at #DCTechDay!” This can expose their fans to our company and vice versa. Now we have just started a conversation that should get a lot of exposure for both parties involved.
Durring the Event:
Pick some hashtags you want to use and be aware of hashtags used by the event hosts. We will be using #Finally #OnlineVoting and #DCTechDay on our social media and encouraging our fans to do so as well. You can even create a sign to push the use of your hashtags, if you have a booth or presentation area.
Take tons of pictures! But make sure not to get swallowed up by your phone. You want to stay engaged with your team and people you will meet. A good idea can be to have someone dedicated to taking pictures. But don’t post all of them while you’re there, you will want to save some for after the event.
After the Event:
Head over to Facebook and make a great big photo album! Hopefully you didn’t post all of the pictures yet. You can then share this on your blog and other platforms to get some descent cross platform promotion. Remember to tag people, even if it is just your team members. Doing so will boost your initial reach. Make the most out of your posts before you start throwing money towards boosting or ads.
Another practice that is proven, is to create a follow up blog post. Your existing fans, along with the new ones are interested in how everything went. Are there any cool updates? Last year, we were able to chat with Congressman Tony Cardenas from California’s 29th district at DC TechDay. Updates like this keep your fans fired up about what you are doing. Write a recap and include a picture or two. You can then put a link to your Facebook album or YouTube video if you got any video footage. Doing this will keep your website nice and fast. It will also get your fans to check out the other platforms you are on. Give people a reason to follow you on more than one social site.
A good tip for Instagram can be the use of bitly. Find the best picture from the event and post it to your Insta. Bitly is a great link shortener that doubles as a tracking program. Since Instagram doesn’t allow you to place links in your descriptions, use a memorable link that your fans can easily remember and type. For example you can create them to look like this: bit.ly/supportfmv. Even though it isn’t clickable in Instagram, our fans can still get to our website or blog post rather easily.
We hope to see you at DC TechDay and be sure to follow us on our social media for post inspiration and to show support for online voting.
About the Author: Will Long is the Marketing Manager of Follow My Vote.