7 Social Media Strategies for Your Regional Conference
Social media strategy for your regional conference
There are tens of thousands of conferences that happen across the world.
When one thinks of a regional conference, they think of something akin to Microsoft’s big-budget spectacles: Thousands of people, dozens of high tech workshops, and innovations and demos left and right.
The truth is, many of the regional conferences that occur are from businesses don’t have the might or budgets of large corporations like Microsoft. As a result, the turnout for these conferences tends to not meet expectations. So how can small or medium-sized startups improve their regional conference attendance and success?
One big way to get eyes on the event (and your brand) is to use social media. Even if you don’t have a massive marketing budget, you can absolutely leverage social media in your favor. In this guide, we’ll be tackling all the social media strategies that you could consider while planning your upcoming conference.
All of these strategies could be useful for a business in any industry. It’s also worth noting that these strategies are not mutually exclusive, either. Consider mixing different strategies together to improve your social media reach for your conference.
Strategy 1: Use Ambassador Platforms
A brand ambassador is simply a person, tool, group, or employee that promotes a brand’s presence online or through word of mouth. Brand ambassadors often speak at regional conferences in order to promote new products, services, and innovations their particular brand is trying to implement which is a good social media strategy.
An ambassador platform is a digital platform that acts as a sort of brand ambassador. Ambassador platforms like DrumUp will often focus on the social media side of things. This will usually involve searching the internet for relatable content to post to a brand’s social media profiles in order to catch the attention of potential customers or fans. On top of curating appropriate social media content, ambassador platforms will also perform tasks such as social media management, hashtag research, app optimization, and overseeing social media analytics.
Ambassador platforms can be fairly affordable and could be an excellent strategy to consider if a small business owner or sales manager wishes to focus more on other aspects of the business: Namely, getting everything prepared and planned for that upcoming regional conference.
Strategy 2: Encourage Brand Advocacy for Social Media Strategy
Engagement is by far the biggest way to encourage brand advocacy via social media. To get your potential attendees’ attention, interacting with them via social media should be the first step.
A handful of ways to encourage brand advocacy through interaction is to post feedback requests or crowdsourcing materials on the conference’s programming. Another way to encourage engagement and possibly turn potential attendees into actual attendees is to use social media polls and voting tools. The easier one can make it possible to bring in feedback, the more likely target audiences will actually engage.
There are smaller ways to improve customer and attendee engagement, including:
- Posting questions to encourage comment section conversation. “What did you enjoy about this blog post?” “Do you agree with this article?”
- Posting relevant timeline photos and videos. The more visual a social media account tends to be in terms of content, the more interested potential attendees will be. Posting photos of works in progress related to the regional conference could spark interest in the actual event.
- Give incentives. Post content with the promise of something in return for viewer engagement. If you’ve crafted a vlog that explores the process behind one of the workshops that will be present at your regional conference, you’re offering a sample look into what potential employees could get out of the conference.
Strategy 3: Invest in Content Curation
Content creations and content curation go hand in hand. Content creation can certainly take up a lot more time and resources to generation. On the other hand, finding the right content to curate on one’s social media accounts can also be a difficult task. Regardless, content curation is absolutely necessary for getting valuable eyes on your brand.
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One way to take care of content curation in an easy way is through automation. DrumUp is a great platform choice for automating content curation. The DrumUp Content Recommendation API can scan hundreds of thousands of ar5ticles, blog posts, and stories from around the internet in order to recommend the most current and eye-catching content for a brand’s social media.
The typical use cases for DrumUp content recommendation API in the context of content curation can include:
- Getting assistance with content curation or generating content ideas for original work
- Getting ahold of the latest trends and popular stories for any one industry, niche, or interest area that could lead potential viewers to a small or medium-sized brand
- Daily updates of stories on specific themes, keywords, etc.
- Brand and media monitoring using keywords
Automation is becoming significantly more popular nowadays for marketing, especially digital marketing. Using automation for content curation is just one small implementation to consider for your business.
It is also worth noting that as the conference draws closer, you will need to entice potential attendees that are not sure if they are going to make the leap to join in on the conference. This should be done with a rush of content.
Collaborate with your speakers, workshop leaders, and other professionals involved in the event to produce teaser content of the conference. Most speakers are already creating short video clips or producing other content that they are promoting to their audience. This can be a wonderful and lucrative opportunity to partner with them to align promotional calendars.
Strategy 4: Intrigue Potential Attendees with Event Pages
Just about any and all events have an official website to help interested viewers learn more about how to attend. However, it seems as if very few actually take full advantage of all the free event listings and event management opportunities in front of them via social media tools. For brands that are planning a regional conference, you should put together event pages on several of the following platforms:
- Your business website
- Facebook Events
- Eventbrite
It would be wise to make sure you select the platform or ticketing software that fits with your target audience. It may seem like quite a bit of a hassle to manage all of these event pages and share them across social media sites, but your potential attendees can vary in the event software they gravitate towards. Spreading your event across different platforms could be an opportunity to double, triple, or quadruple your search engine listings in the long run.
These event creation tools also serve as a way to contact your attendees in the weeks or days leading up to the event in order to remind them to invite their friends or colleagues, as well as what they can look forward to.
Strategy 5: Encourage Employees Ambassadors to Take Part
A regional conference typically involves leaders, brand employees, employee ambassadors, and professionals. There are quite a few people leaning on the success of this upcoming regional conference. And a lot of those people may already have a substantial social media presence.
A great strategy to consider in promoting your conference via social media is to pool the efforts of your partners and employees. If you have speakers, workshop leaders, and conference partners, ask them to invite their followers on social media to attend the event. Naturally, your brand should already have at least an event page for your partners to share beforehand. Provide some branded images or timeline videos that they can use to share with their audience as well. The less effort it takes to share, the more likely they are to share your content with their audience.
Strategy 6: Create a Regional Conference Hashtag and Invigorate Your Attendees
By using a designated regional conference hashtag that is unique to your brand consistently, you can boost the social media conversation around your upcoming conference. And ultimately, your registration sales could see a significant increase.
There are a number of ways to get the most out of your conference hashtag.
It would be smart to not wait until the actual event day to announce a hashtag. Choose a hashtag for the very first day that you announce the regional conference through social media, and include that hashtag in all of your social media engagements. This will help build up excitement from your already dedicated audience and help unify and grow the community of attendees. Make sure that the hashtag is visible at your regional conference as well. Include it in your brochures, signage, and demo screens throughout your chosen venue.
You can also give people an incentive to use your hashtag and share your event on social media. This could involve setting up a photo booth that features your hashtag or creating a photo or video competition in which the best photo using your hashtag wins a prize at the end of the event. Incentive is key for successful social media marketing of an event.
Be sure to continue to actively promote the event hashtag and invite users to share their content on Twitter and Instagram right up to the day of the event. Start interacting with potential and established attendees before the event begins to build brand awareness and personal relationships with attendees.
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Strategy 7: Create a Regional Conference Day-Of Plan of Social Media Strategies
There is a good chance that you will have a lot going on during the conference itself, so it is important to prepare as much social content as you can in advance.
We mentioned the benefits of automating your curated content via social media. As the date draws near for the actual event, you will want to plan ahead to automate virtually all of your social media content to avoid errors or disorganization during the madness of the event day.
Try to create a library of assets and pre-written or pre-curated social media posts to share throughout your regional conference date. Then, consider using a social media automation tool like DrumUp to share these saved-up posts when the timing is most relevant. When a demo leader or speaker mentions a recent study that relates to their talk, present attendees will be happy to find a link to it on social media already. Again, convenience is everything to getting and keeping attendees.
Engage attendees through social media on the event date as well. Have a dedicated “investigator” or team members to speckle your social media pages with live insights from their own social media account. For example, an employee can do a Facebook Live interview with vendors and workshop leaders, or post social media polls about something controversial a speaker said to encourage engagement. This goes hand-in-hand with what we mentioned previously about getting employee ambassadors to take part in the promotion of the event online.
DrumUp as a Social Media Solution
DrumUp is a social media management and employee advocacy platform. Drum Up heavily focuses on finding the perfect content for your social media campaigns, including the campaigns you plan on using to improve the outcome of your regional conference.
DrumUp discovers and helps businesses share incredible content to their social media accounts in order to start conversations with customers and improve overall brand presence online, all for a very affordable price. You can cute social media management time by up to 90% so you can focus on other aspects of your business that need more attention. Consider DrumUp the social media heavy lifters for hire!
How was our guide to social media strategies a smaller or medium-sized business can use to improve their conference outcome? Tell us what strategies you plan on implementing in the comments section below!
Image Source: pixabay.com/illustrations/social-media-social-media-3408791
Image Source: Pixabay
