Whether you’re organizing a conference, internal event, graduation party, or trade fair — social media can go a long way toward making your event a success.
From planning to promotion. Social media can help you with every step of the event process, from promoting your event to entertaining your audience. Here are 7 tips on how you can use social media for events and achieve your goals.
1. Get an event hashtag
Come up with a hashtag for your event and tell everyone about it. Choose a suitable hashtag or two and promote it on your social media channels, in your newsletter, on posters at the venue, and all your event materials. Make sure your attendees know about the hashtag and encourage them to use it when posting about and from your event. Learn everything you need to know about event hashtags from our hashtag campaign guide.
Collect attendee generated-content from social media and direct posts on a social wall and display them on live screens at your venue or alongside the live stream. Encourage your audience to share their experience using your hashtag and watch their posts pop up on the screen. An event wall is a fantastic ice breaker because it sparks conversation and creates a sense of community.
With Direct Posts you can collect more content from your attendees. This feature allows your community to directly publish image and text posts to your wall without having to use any social media platform.
People who aren’t on social media or that prefer not to post on social media to submit to a wall, will now have a chance to do so without compromising their privacy. Your community will have the option to post on social media or directly on your wall. More options means more people and more people means more content.
Check How to use Direct Posts for detailed instructions about the feature, moderation, and different use case examples.
Collect unique content with Direct Posts
4. Set up a virtual photo booth
One of the main challenges that event organizers have is to engage attendees. That’s a equally difficult task for in-person, hybrid and virtual events. And while networking and matchmaking sessins are great to make valuable connections, we still need something more — a bit of fun.
Social walls and virtual photo booths are two of the most significant engagement drivers for virtual events simply because people enjoy creating and sharing content. So why not combine both tools to get an ultimate interactive solution?
Creating custom photo content and displaying it on a social wall fosters community and helps speakers and sponsors connect with the audience. Moreover, by showing selfies from attendees, you help your speakers fight the feeling that they’re talking into a vacuum. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.
5. Ask attendees to create TikTok videos during the event
TikTok is full of “A day in the life” vlogs in which creators, influencers and everyday people share their daily meals, errands, special events, etc. Encourage your event attendees to document their event experience on TikTok, then repost their content on your account and and display it automatically it on your social wall! Attendees will be happy to get their 15 minutes of fame. You can even create a separate TikTok widget and showcase that content in a recap blog post or on the landing page you build for your next event.
Show engaging TikTok content on your website or live display.
Turn your ticket sales into more ticket sales! Once someone has bought a ticket for your event, prompt them to tell their friends and followers about it. Give them options to share the news directly from the success page after they have acquired their ticket. You can even prepare an automatic sharing message that already includes your event hashtag, making it even easier for people to drum up more promotion for your event.
7. Live stream your event
Set up a live stream like Google did here to make your event available to a broader audience. Share the link to the live stream on social media and encourage audience participation for your hashtag. You can even embed your social wall in your live stream.