This post covers the third stage in a simple ABC approach – Announce > Broadcast > Consolidate to using social media to promote your events.
Use social media to build on your event’s success
This mini-series has already looked at how to use social media to promote your event and how to use Twitter in particular at the event to engage participants in the room and those online in your discussions and debates.
If your event has gone well and you have integrated social media into its planning and the day itself, you should have engaged a large number of people in the issues you are wanting to promote.
This post will show you how, with a relatively small amount of effort, you can consolidate your efforts to meet two main objectives.
- You can provide everyone with an interest in your topic or organisation with an easy-to-digest summary of the key issues and talking points.
- You can publicise your organisation’s know-how and expertise to a very large group of potential supporters.
Consolidating the value of your event for your supporters
If you followed the advice in last week’s post, you will have encouraged speakers and workshop presenters not just to make their presentations available online but to curate a range of digital resources.
It is then easy for you to tweet links to this material:
“Interested in payment by results? @AylesburyRisk put together this guide to managing risk for our #russwebtPbRconf [Link]”
But you can go further and capture the range of views not just of speakers but of participants and online followers who contributed via Twitter, as well as any media coverage.
The easy way to do this is by using Storify – a free online curation tool.
Basically Storify allows you to collect any digital content – online articles, photos, videos, tweets – into a simple narrative format to provide a very rounded view of an issue.
Here’s my detailed post on how to use Storify and an example of a recent Storify I put together about the possibility of Brighton having the UK’s first drug consumption room.
One of the attractions of Storify is that it only takes a minute to update the story and add new views and comments.
So, you can create a Storify of your event, tweet out a link to it and then add any new comments or debate on a particular issue that your Storify has generated.
Engaging with new supporters
In the old days (about five years ago), I was quite often commissioned to write conference reports.
I would get them done in a couple of weeks, my version of events would go off for approval from the speakers which would take 2-4 weeks.
The final version would then be sent to the designers (one month), the printers (another month) and some 4-6 months later, a hard copy would come through the letterbox of all the participants who would pick it up and try to remember something about the conference.
Now you can follow up on your event the next day.
Collect the twitter names from everyone tweeting about the event simply by searching for the conference hashtag on Twitter.
If you did decide to use a Twitter Wall, many of the services will allow you to harvest all the tweeters who participated.
Then engage key people directly via Twitter.
Who are key people?
Well you decide who is key for your organisation, but I would suggest:
- People who tweeted a lot and clearly have an interest in your subject area
- People with plenty of Twitter followers who can help spread your messages
- People who made particularly useful or interesting comments
- People from the media or who are influential in your sphere of operation (politicians, commissioners, Think Tanks, funders…)
So, instead of a one-off event bringing your concerns to a couple of hundred people, you can engage many more in the whole process from planning the day, deciding on speakers, right through to continuing conversations and debates days and weeks after.
In the process, you can rapidly grow the number of people interested in the work of your organisation.
And finally
Don’t forget to use Twitter and Facebook to ask for feedback on your event and get ideas for topics for future ones.
So that’s a very simple ABC approach to using social media to get the most impact out of your event:
- Announce
- Broadcast
- Consolidate
By thinking digital at the start of the process, creating your hashtag and opening up your ideas and plans online, it is much easier to follow that process through so that thinking digital becomes second nature.
You may be surprised to find that going digital can save you a lot of expense and time – no more stuffing envelopes with flyers and conference reports, outsource your booking to an online event organiser at relatively little cost (almost definitely cheaper if you factor in the cost of in-house labour).
You’ll also be amazed at how easy it is to extend the reach of your event and take people with you on a journey of discovery about the work your organisation does.
If you’d like to develop your tweeting skills, check out my online Twitter coaching service which includes an individualised profile of your Twitter style.
