As with most things to do with meetings, a good event social media program starts with setting goals. During a recent MeetingsNet webinar, Brooke Gracey, manager of mobile strategy, CrowdCompass by Cvent, shared the following three-step strategy one of her clients, Fiatech, used for a recent conference.
Gracey said Fiatech set three main goals for its social media marketing:
• Gain new followers
• Engage existing users
• Increase social posts
Then it put its social plan into play to achieve those goals:
Step 1: Use a universal hashtag.
Organizers used a simple #Fiatech hashtag—no number, no year, no individual conference identifier. The planner told Gracey that, by keeping it generic, they avoided putting a shelf life on the event and made it easier to continue the sharing year-round.
Step 2: Use app push notifications to remind people to use the hashtag.
Step 3: Use humans to also push the hashtag while on site. “They got buy-in from speakers, moderators, and on-site staff so that whenever they were talking with attendees, they would remind them to use the hashtag when posting to social media,” said Gracey.
So, how did it work? The organization gained more than 10 percent new followers as a result of the campaign. They also had more than 5,000 social posts. “These are your attendees telling their networks how fantastic your event is,” said Gracey. “You can’t get any better marketing than that.”
