The Power of Social Media for Events
We are very lucky to work in events. For loads of reasons. Sometimes it may be the free food and wine tasting. Or the ‘room upgrade’ that you get EVEN without asking (once your hand over your business card of course) Or maybe it’s the last minute call to fill a corporate space at a sporting final or music festival. We do have a good life. So it’s with this background that we should be thanking our lucky stars that someone went and made EVERYTHING EVEN better for us and invented Social Media. But this Blog questions if we guilty of looking this particular gift horse in the mouth? Are we doing enough with it to add value to everyone who is involved in our events? Especially within our learning events, do we really know how to use social media at a conference?
How to use social media at a conference
We have to take full advantage of Social Media. And all we have to do are two things. We have to REALISE THE POTENTIAL and more importunity we have to USE THAT POTENTIAL!
The perfect marriage
In one flick of a switch Social Media allowed us to do several things that had always been a big challenge for organisers. Almost overnight our life was made so much easier. Now I am sure you will recognise all of these concerns. These things really used to keep us up at night:
1. How do we find people who would be interested in our event but who are not on our aged and badly managed email database?
2. How do we find and follow what our competition is up to?
3. How do we enable attendees to talk about our event? How can they big it up for us?
4. How can we get our event out to more people so they can see how good it is?
5. How can we add more value to our sponsors and our exhibitors?
6. How do we create an effective way to properly engage people so we can hear what they think at our event?
Owing to social media we don’t need to worry about these anymore! Using social media to do all these things gives us more time to think about the 100 things we do have to worry about!
Social media of course is not the answer to everything but as I’ve listed above it really does help us in areas where we really used to struggle. But if that’s true let’s not rest on our laurels. Let’s make sure we wring the sponge dry and get as much out of social media as we can. We must be experts on how to use social media at a conference and an exhibition we must do everything we can to increase the value for all of our stakeholders. Let’s make our great life a wee bit easier by using social media to its full power.
