In the coming year, “social media will continue to take a larger communication role in meetings and events, but we have to get more creative about how we integrate it,” says Kelsey Dixon, a cofounder, with Makenzie Davies, of branding and experiential marketing firm davies + dixon. “We’re past the ‘been there, done that, tweeted about it,’ stage.” With live-streaming continuing to gain popularity, Dixon and Davies point to Snapchat, Instagram Stories, and Facebook Live as the more creative and effective social media options for 2017.
Kurt Paben, president, Channel and Employee Loyalty, Aimia Proprietary Loyalty U.S. is already all in on Snapchat. “We are using Snapchat for meetings, conferences, and trade shows. It has the ability to create an experiential element that allows attendees to share their timely and most authentic event moments with all their followers—those at the conference and back home.”
Snapchat To-Do List
What makes an effective meeting posting for the newest social media options? Here are three Snapchat essentials from Kelly Treadway, EventCurious
• Post the behind-the-scenes action shots. Show the production crew setting up and breaking down to give people an appreciation for what goes into making the magic happen. Or you can build anticipation with pictures of your volunteers stuffing conference bags.
• Post pre-show interviews with key speakers and vendors. You also can do a “takeover” where you let an influential individual post on the account for a day. One organization that does this well is Broadway.com, which lets actors in New York and London takeover its account and post behind-the-scenes shots.
• Use geofilters. Unique to Snapchat, geofilters are words or illustrations that are overlaid on snaps sent from a specific location—say, your trade show floor. Event organizers submit their design to Snapchat, choose the location and timeframe, and for a relatively small fee (it starts around $5 for 20,000 square feet), the event brand is overlaid on snaps sent from that location. Geofilter data tells you how many times it was used and how many views resulted.
