We’ve discussed the benefits of your brand featuring at a big event (helping promote your brand against competitors at the event, sparking conversations with new leads, and exemplifying your expertise) but how can you ensure that you’re maximising engagement and impressions (to help justify the extreme ticket prices)? Here’s some top tips:
It’s all about the angles
We can all learn from Kylie Jenner when it comes to posting a winning picture – it’s all about getting the best angles, lighting and background. When you’re live posting to social media at an event, pictures and videos will always perform better. In fact, posts with pictures receive about 34% more engagement than those without, and this is hugely beneficial for awareness of your brand.
During the working day and throughout the event, consider that your audience is more than likely to be viewing the content you post on their mobile. Therefore, try and think about capturing landscape videos and images from talks, sessions or interviews in order for the content to be optimised for best viewing on mobile platforms.
It may sound obvious to marketers but can be forgotten during the excitement of an event, but avoid too much background noise, people blocking photos, or bored-looking faces when you’re posting an image from a speech or presentation. Make your audience envious of the event, not glad to be at home watching TV!
No event is complete without a hashtag
Again, in the heat of the moment at events, it can be easy to forget to use the event hashtag in your posts. However, this is a really important part of live-tweeting for two main reasons – driving awareness and measuring success.
Although it seems impossible to remember a time without the ‘hashtag’ on social media, one of the main reasons it became the tool we know and love now was to allow users to track a topic without having to follow everyone discussing this topic. Remembering this principle when including the hashtag in your live posts means that you can leverage the audience either attending the event or interested in the event. You should find that this increases retweets, likes and replies as other users at the event share your content with their own audience.
The party don’t start ‘til you walk in
If you’re a smaller brand competing against large competitors, being heard/seen amongst the hustle and bustle of a popular event is vital in order to make your attendance there worthwhile. If you want engagement, you need to make sure your post doesn’t get lost in the sea of comments and pictures. Ways to do this could be getting an exclusive quote for Twitter from a keynote speaker or showing a video of a product demo that users not at the event wouldn’t see otherwise. Alternatively, adding a humorous element to posts can lighten up any business event.
Think big – if Taylor Swift can receive over 88k mentions during the 2016 Grammy Awards, why can’t your brand be the most talked about company at a B2B event? Imagine if you could get just a fraction of this amount of people talking about your brand during an event.
@ me next time
Just like no Oscars ceremony is complete without A-list stars like Meryl Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio…no B2B event is complete without B2B social media influencers, CEOs of top companies and expert keynote speakers. Make sure you make a note of their usernames and tag them in your posts (whether that be if you watch their presentation, or you just know they’re in attendance). There is no doubt that they will similarly wanting to be promoting their attendance at the event by posting as much as possible to generate excitement. If they then retweet or reply to your post, this enables you to leverage their Twitter audience as well – ultimately increasing your brand awareness.
For outsiders looking in, seeing actual conversations between users about an event is likely to attract more attention than just promotional posts. You might not be fussed about attending a party until you hear that everyone is talking about it – B2B events can act in the same way!
