There has been a considerable shift in the trends of sectors including the event industry.
Ever since the pandemic has pushed people to include social distancing and lockdown restrictions, event professionals have shifted their focus and adopted the virtual route.
This article will give you useful tips on how to leverage social media for virtual events.
What methods and tactics to use to maximize the attendance and reap the most benefits.
Even though virtual events come with a lot of advantages, it can be quite a task to engage the audience like a regular in-person event.
Seeing this, event professionals have begun to include various other mediums to make their events successful.
Of all mediums, social media has emerged as one of the most powerful mediums due to the benefits that come with it, especially if you can really tap into your audience with the best social media management tools.
Be it for event promotions or audience engagement, social media surely stands tall amongst all the other mediums.
However, if you are not aware of the power of social media and how it holds tremendous power to transform your event, then you are at the right place.
In this blog post you’ll learn to leverage social media to promote virtual events.
You’ll find it’s one of the powerful strategies to take your virtual event to a whole new level.
6 Effective Ways to Use Social Media for Virtual Events
1. Promote The Virtual Event Using Hashtags
Ever since Chris Messina invented Hashtags on Twitter, they have exploded tremendously in popularity and become quite a sensation in the social media world.
Apart from using hashtags just for content discoverability and segregation, it is used by brands to run campaigns too. This is how they have made an important place for themselves in promoting upcoming virtual events.
As an event marketer, you need to create a hashtag that is memorable and catches the attention of your audience. Additionally, you can run contests on social media and ask your audience to participate in the activity by using your hashtag.
To help you be more creative, you can use hashtag generator tools to generate hashtags that are “discoverable” and catch the attention of your audience.
For more impact, you can offer a few interesting prizes and coupons to the ones with the best inputs. This would increase the participation of the audience and keep them engaged at the same time.
2. Leverage Influencer Marketing
Most social media platforms are full of social media users who term themselves as influencers since they hold the power to influence their followers.
For promoting your event, you can collaborate with a few influencers that enjoy a decent following on their social media handle, and ask them to highlight your virtual event, your speakers for the event, and the other aspects that the audience looks forward to.
The influencers promote the link to the registration form in their bio or in the caption of the post. They can either be creative on their own or use a bio generator.
For more impact, you can ask the influencers to create a short video and showcase snippets of what the audience can expect from the virtual event.
3. Include A Social Media Wall For Maximum Engagement
The audience engagement is of utmost importance for ensuring that the audience stays throughout the virtual event. One of the best ways to keep the audience engaged is to include an efficient tool like the social wall for virtual events.
If you are unfamiliar with the concept, a social media wall or social wall is a collection of live or aggregated social media feeds from various social media networks in a collective and customized format. The users can make the social media wall visually appealing depending on the tool chosen by them.
Your audience too is regular social media users who post content daily. You can host a fun activity and push your audience to post content on their social media in the form of images, videos, selfies, etc.
You can collect the content and post it in the form of a social media wall. Your audience will be excited to see their content being featured and it would push others to also create and post content.
4. Live Stream The Event On Social Media
The biggest advantage of virtual events is that they can easily be attended by the users from the comfort of their homes, no matter where they are worldwide.
Live video streaming has become quite popular and a sensation for brands to interact with their potential customers on a personal level. Using social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc, the users can easily live stream the virtual event for their audiences to attend. Additionally, it instills curiosity amongst the followers to be a part of the event.
5. Use Paid Advertising
Another great way of leveraging social media marketing while promoting your event is to use paid advertising as a promotional medium. Almost every social media platform offers paid advertising to its users.
Be it promoted posts or pay-per-click ads, running advertisements on social media is a great move to get more exposure to your virtual event.
Depending on the platform, you may get an opportunity to run the ad based on demographics like location, details of target audience like age, gender, etc. This way you will be able to showcase the ad at the right time to the right set of audience.
6. Monitor The Event After It Is Over
One of the biggest advantages of using social media during event planning is that it helps you not only through the event, but also helps in determining the success rate of the virtual event.
Using social media for virtual events promotion, you can collect data that can help you judge the success or failure of your campaign. Moreover, people use social media to express their views and thoughts.
There is a chance that they may talk about their experience with the event and post content about it. You can get insights from e.g. Facebook Ads comments and take them into consideration.
Key Takeaways for Social Media for Virtual Events
This brings us to the end of this post and you are now familiar with the different ways in which you can use social media for virtual events effectively and cover all the important bases.
When promoting virtual events on social media, use hashtags on your own account and let your micro-influencers do the same.
Bring paid ads to the mix on social media and on Google.
During the virtual event itself, use a social wall to broadcast all the conversations that are going on and use a quality live streaming platform to broadcast the event.
The whole sign up flow, all the way until the event follow-up emails should be monitored and analyzed, so you can learn and do better each time.
The massive user base of social media has helped event professionals take their events to another level.
Now that you know it all, get set and prepare for your next virtual event already!
To bulk schudule social media posts and discover sharable content, we recommend using a social media scheduling app
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