Social Media Event Marketing: What I Learned

On April 14, I joined several hundred event professionals in participating in an free webinar presented by Cvent and MeetingsNet and hosted by Sue Pelletier of Medical Meetings and the Face2Face blog. The audio webinar was titled "Event Marketing 2.0--Social Media for Events" and featured speakers Lara McCulloch Carter of Ready2Spark, Kate Slonaker of Cvent and Julius Solaris of Event Manager Blog.

Here are a few things I took away from the webinar:

+ Listening: Know what the online community is saying about your event. Lara McCulloch Carter brought up Social Mention and even linked to a video she made explaining the site. On Social Mention you can see what people are saying about you or your event, how positive the comments are, what keywords they are using, etc. Carter also mentioned Twitter Advanced Search as useful tool for following real-time conversations. She explains it here.

+ Hashtags: I learned about Twubs as a site to check to make sure you are creating a unique hashtag or to learn about an existing hashtag.

+ LinkedIn: Some tips on how to use the Events app effectively, by filling out all forms and keywords to make it searchable, updating your status weekly and encouraging people (including speakers and coworkers) to click that they are attending.

+ Websites: Advice to link event sites to social media, by including a "share this" button, the ability to add to calendar or even a Twitter feed.

+ Strategy: The speakers reinforced the importance of knowing which social media sites your audience uses and creating a strategy for each social media site that fits that site and its audience--don't treat them all the same.

If you want to learn more, check the Twitter feed for the hashtag #event2pt0 and see the conversation from yesterday or hop on over to the site, where the entire webinar is available on demand (with downloadable slides).

--Ellie M. Bayrd
Associate Editor

 

Comments

[Lara McCulloch-Carter]

Ellie, what a fantastic recap! Thank you for sharing with your readers. I'll be sure to post your recap on my blog as well.

Regards,

Lara

[Associate Editor Ellie M. Bayrd]

Lara,
Thanks. In addition to passing this info to our readers, we hope to put it to use for marketing our fall Vision Awards event.
Best, Ellie