How To Use Social Media To Drive Event Success

Before Your Event

Ramp up awareness and excitement. You need time to prepare an event-specific social media management plan and promote your event.

Hashtag it!

Make sure your event has an easily recognizable hashtag that hasn’t been used before.

Have a visual plan

Great visual content is key for event promotion. Make sure the cameras and photographers are set and ready. Will you have someone on the ground capable of capturing key moments with a smartphone and instantly posting to social? Will you need to send photos out to a remote social media manager? Will you take professional photos at the event and switch out memory cards to get amazing quality photos posted as swiftly as possible? Answer all of these questions BEFORE the event and communicate with your entire team in advance to avoid a social media communication breakdown at your event.

During Your Event

Behind the scenes exclusives

This is great in video format. That means Facebook Live, Snapchat, and Instagram (both stories and regular posts).

Prepare giveaways

 Drive people to your event- or location at a broader event- by announcing giveaways via social. The best times to do this is at the peak moments of the event, when you want maximum attendance.

After Your Event

Follow up

It's essential to make sure all of your hard work at the event leaves you with ongoing social engagement and reach.

Don't drop the ball on social the minute the event is over. Continue to post and engage with the new additions to your audience of followers. 

Gather analytics        

 See what worked, what flopped, and how to improve for your next event.

And if you need help, reach out to our team at Kicking Cow. Our event management, production, and social media teams work together to help our clients seamlessly launch and run the events of their marketing dreams. 

3 Easy Tips Keep Your Social Presence From Turning Robotic

Social calendars are a necessity- especially when we’re talking social content calendars. It allows you to make sure your various platforms are covered with excellent content throughout the year and avoid the last minute content scramble.  

Pre-scheduling is a great option to make sure content pushes live even when you’re too busy with other tasks to sit at your desk at the exact optimized moment you want your little gem to grace the internet.

But beware: do not let scheduling push you to the automated edge. Humans are social, robots are automated.

Nothing kills social media, and your page’s engagement rates, like automation.

1.     Remember to stay social.

It’s not called automated media, folks. It’s social media for a reason. People login to scroll through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat (and the list goes on..) to connect with others. 

We’re a society living behind screens, but we still crave to interact. If you’re allowing your company’s social postings to hang out and no one on your team ever takes time to interact with your followers, your engagement is going to spiral to its demise.

2.     You’ll reap what you sow.  

Reaping what you sow has left the farmlands and joined us in the 21st century of online marketing. If your company decides to go with the approach of putting in as little effort as possible, all the while hoping for maximum reach to potential customers, you’ll find yourself incredibly disappointed with the social media machine.

For true success, you need someone dedicated to making your company’s social media a vibrant internet world. If you put only minimum effort into client acquisition or other aspects of your particular business, it wouldn’t grow either. Social media is no different.

3.      Relationships are a give and take.

Remember to communicate to consumers in a non-obtrusive way. Your followers are not there to buy every product you produce, to brainlessly like every post you publish, or in any way to boost your ego. 

 Followers follow because they enjoyed something you had to offer. Good advice, funny videos, giveaways. People engage because their emotions engage with your brand and your ongoing posts. They can just as easily unfollow your company on social if they are sick of your brand or feel they are gaining nothing from your never-ending calls to action.

 Endless pushes to buy, buy, buy will have your followers saying bye, bye, bye. Never take that for granted. Social media is the perfect place to offer free emotional engagement that, when done well, can turn into increased engagement and, ultimately, sales.