#smw14

Whether you’re holding a music festival, business conference or educational event, the power of social media before, during and after an event can really help to drive ticket sales, engage an audience and encourage feedback.

We were lucky enough to join a masterclass at Social Media Week 2014, hosted by successful online ticketing service Eventbrite, who shared their unique insights and tips on how to truly engage an audience before, during and after an event.

Before

According to Eventbrite, 50% of people engage with hosts and fellow attendees before an an event takes place. This is a clear opportunity for you to drive interactions and generate leads prior to the event.

Build anticipation and excitement leading up to an event by gradually revealing key information about the event days, weeks or months prior to the event.

Use various digital channels to support social media efforts including online media, social advertising and email marketing.

Relive previous or similar events to grab attention of those who have yet to experience it and really promote what makes your event unmissable. Be inspiring.

Work in harmony with event sponsors, special guests or speakers to further spread the word of the event with the potential to acquire members of their audience who may not have known about the event before.

Eventbrite shared their experience of pre-event promotion on social media and stated that a social share can generate up to £6.13 of additional ticket sale revenue with £3.00 of that revenue being generated via Twitter. A key indication that investment in social media can really make a difference to the overall success of the event.

During

Almost 75% of an audience at an event can be fearful of speaking in public! It’s therefore essential that you are able to provide your audience with the means of communicating with you without any added pressure. for example, via social networks.

Nowadays, we have access to platforms such as Sli.do and Tint which will provide you with the tools to let your audience engage and participate with you through social media. Social media walls allow for content coming through various different social channels to be displayed at your event and give speakers or hosts the opportunity to read and answer questions.

Encourage your audience to engage with your event by setting a carefully considered hashtag that will allow users to tag their posts, making event-specific conversations easy to follow. The mentions, comments and data shared with event organisers can be carefully monitored by the event organiser themselves and can later be reused to emphasise the success of an event.

Developing an app is also a great way to engage an audience during an event and can also help improve the overall experience. Digital tickets or passes can be made available within the app as well as an event schedule, event location details and links to social channels can be integrated into one easy to use platform.

From our own experience at Dog, we’re well aware of how successful implementing platforms such as a live social media wall can be. Dog's own digital festival which took place in Glasgow in June, achieved excellent levels of engagement. We used social aggregation service Tint to create a live social media feed that was projected onto walls at the event. The social wall aggregated content from Twitter and Instagram that used a dedicated event hashtag (#DFest2014) and was used to display our guests' experiences, questions, photos and feedback throughout the night. The high engagement levels caused the event hashtag trended locally during the evening.

After

While the nature of a live event is something to be cherished, the power of social media allows our audience to relive the best moments and gives those who missed out the opportunity to experience some of what they never got to see.

Firstly ensure that during the event, audiences both at the event and following the event online are clearly directed or informed on how they can reflect on the event after - many missed opportunities for social interaction are due to a lack of direction to the content which will be available after the event takes place.

Short video content that highlights the key points of the event will be well received and easy to consume in a digital space.

There’s further opportunity to connect with missed consumers. Those who chose not to buy tickets could reconsider for your next event with strategic and well-thought out social content which highlights why the event was so worthwhile and what attendees got from it. Positive attendee feedback is beneficial for this.

There are many opportunities and ways in which you can drive the success of an event before, during and after but the important thing to remember is that it needs to be relevant to your audience, the content is there to inspire and encourage your audience and that it is reflective of your brand.

Your social media audience follows, on average, 6 brands via social channels, making it difficult to get your brand into the chosen group.

Whether you’re a big brand or start-up business, there are ways to get your brand noticed and stand out above the rest. Sometimes all it really takes is a good story!

Here are some simple steps to successful story telling on social:

Establish what your overall goals are for your business and how they can be translated online. Is your aim to gain brand awareness or generate leads?

Think about how you want to make your audience feel.  Connecting to the emotive side of your audience can be very powerful and could help them relate to your brand on a deeper level.

Who are you as a brand?  Failures in brand storytelling are often down to a lack of established personality and tone of voice. People need something that they can take away from your brand - an understanding of what your brand is trying to achieve and who they want to connect to.

Discover who and where your audience are. Maybe you think you’re appealing to an age group of 25-35 year old working mothers but have you really done the research and pinpointed the real data? And if so, are you connecting with them on the right channel? Yes, everyone uses Facebook but perhaps your audience are most engaged and inspired on Pinterest.

Find the plot of your story. Storytelling is about having that emotional connection and being able to inspire - go outside the norm and don’t focus your research on the obvious i.e. Facebook Insights. Look towards other mediums that could make your social story unique.

What outcomes do you want from your story? Think about the type of return you would want to see from telling your story. Is it to draw in new consumers? Or to collate feedback from your existing consumers?

Keep it emotional, sociable and shareable. The rise of sites like Buzzfeed made us realise that people relate to content that they can recognise themselves in. They might look at an article called “29 awkward moments that can only happen at work” and think “oh that happened to me recently, I'll share it on Facebook".

The power of delight. Recognition of your consumers and their needs is something that you should be talking about. It can be something as little as acknowledging their interaction with you on Twitter with a personable reply or actually taking physical action with something and making a statement, like surprising a customer with a gesture. Only recently, a British comedian tweeted that he would love a bit of pizza while on a train journey. Domino's Pizza heard his call and managed to deliver it to him at the next station. This became a viral hit and is proof that making a statement like that can have a profound effect on your company’s social story.

Let’s start with a basic definition of Native Advertising:

"A form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience in which it is placed".

Take a read at our blog piece on Buzzfeed for an example of native advertising.

Native ads are intended to match the visual design of the experience they live within and look and feel to the average online user as natural content.

They can come in many shape or size including in-feed native ads, search and promotional listings, content recommendation widgets, and can be developed into customised content.

We live in a generation where the media consumption is changing to meet our digital lives. A common image see across our daily lives is that of a face buried deep into a phone. Mobile is quickly becoming a lead in delivering information to us on a day to day basis so we, as advertisers need to consider ways in which our content can be consumed to reflect a digital world.

Something which is becoming more common on both desktop and mobile platforms is the implementation of ‘the feed’. It’s a scroll of information more commonly seen on the likes of our social feeds and on media sites such as The Guardian.

Content is now being presented to these consumers of information through a simple headline and thumbnail format, reducing the depth of the content but delivering the crucial points through short and snappy titles.

Interestingly, content consumption has actually increased since the introduction of feeds with headlines being more influential than the article itself. A study by Sharethrough showed that although people may have been retweeting headlines on Twitter, there was no correlation between the number of retweets and the clicks on links. This is obviously indicating to us that people are wanting more and more of their content in short-form.

This leads us to think whether it's more beneficial to deliver native ads which have strong headlines that tell the story that could have a stronger impact on your audience. This could potentially become the new normal for brands - spreading meaningful stories through headlines.

From this we can develop new content strategies:

Embrace the placement

Develop a new content palette - reconsider where your content will be seen, reaching out to audience who revolve around social media and feeds.

Create a more modern marketing mix

Understand the variables related to it