Social Media and Event Management

The users of the various social media platforms, currently available to public, are increasing every day. Businesses view social media as a promotional opportunity for their products and services. Here we are going to look at the event management business and how it connects with social media. How can social media help event marketing? Or how can event marketers harness the power of Social Media to make their events more successful?

Why is Social Media important?
Social Media helps you and your business reach your target network of people related to your event. Create a group on your preferred Social Media Platform. Then invite vendors or your audience to join your group. These would form your database for the future, and would create a buzz about your event. You could filter your target vendors or audience and send them information about events that are of particular interest to them. This would improve your event attendance as well.
In fact, social media performs as well as word of mouth. Active social media users are more likely to read posts and reviews online, for example on YouTube, blogs, and other social forums; and 3 out of 5 create their own reviews of products, services, and even post about events they went to. Active event attendees are willing to share their event experience with thousands of contacts on their social platform if they like or are interested in  your event.
Get more noise for your events or conferences by creating more engagement before, during, and after the event. Update some posts that are related to your event before it, such as videos, pictures or photos, even related links. During the event, post some photos and videos about the event site. You can also mention the location and time, again, in order to get more attention from the people. Afterwards, post some photos of the people being engaged in and at your event, as well as some comments from vendors and audience.
Promoting events on social media is a great way to drive attendance. If there are 600 million people on Facebook, 100 million people on LinkedIn, and 40 million on Twitter, common sense would tell you some of those people might be interested in attending your event.
Attendees are now empowered to become reviewers or critics of events. When they are armed with social networks which act as a global online publishing platform, attendees can easily publish their feedback for the world to see. This forces planners to take their event experiences to the next level. Furthermore, your target audiences or vendors may consider the comments from pervious participants as feedback or a review and base their decision to attend your next event or not.
Social media also can shape the reputation of your events and your organization. Events and conferences are largely successful over time because of their good reputation with vendors and attendees. In that regard social media represents a huge opportunity to improve your reputation and success.  That can be as simple as hearing feedback from attendees and making changes based on that feedback.
As social media grows and evolves rapidly, event industries should take this growth as an advantage for event marketing and management. Not only promote your event, but also get feedback from the attendees for marketing research and take your event experiences to the next level.