Maximizing the Impact of Social Media, Videos and Community Engagement during Events

September 11, 2015

Take your engagement to a higher level with expansive, exciting social media.

By Susan King Glosby, CFE

The date and venue of your convention is set. Your agenda and speakers are scheduled. A little voice in your company asks: “What about social media? How are we promoting our event? What’s our hashtag?”

Through social media, your event allows you to increase engagement with your franchisees, customers, and followers. On your corporate social media sites, pictures and content from your convention give consumers a glimpse into your brand culture. When a consumer sees that you invest in educating and supporting your franchise owners while having fun doing it, your brand loyalty and integrity can increase exponentially. With the current consumer climate of supporting businesses with a positive, giving culture, your social media photos speak volumes. This may also foster interest in your brand with franchise sales leads after this inside glimpse into your convention.

In the local market, franchisees who are “tagged” in social media posts and who have shared content or photos from the event, show their own customers that they are invested in their business by furthering their education. This gives considerable credibility and demonstrates the desire to continue to improve their service within their community.

This franchise involvement also increases your franchisees loyalty and desire to continue to improve the system. Being included in posts, tagged in photos and quoted in memes all give participants recognition for being an integral part of your event and franchise system. Social media integration boosts the camaraderie and connection of your franchisees, both those attending and those watching in social media.

Preparation, planning and engagement throughout your event cycle, gives you substantial advantages for your franchise brand. Utilizing social media increases your credibility and amplifies your brand’s message to all who view your content.

Before Your Convention

Decide on a hashtag. It should be short and recognizable. Include it in all of your outgoing information about the event, on all event information and clearly use it to promote the event. For example, the International Franchise Association used #IFA2015 for its most recent convention, #FranTech for the Digital Marketing and Technology Conference and #GIFA2015 for the Google/IFA Summit in April. For FIT4MOM’s next conference, the hashtag will be #F4MBU, because the theme is “Be You.” The hashtag should be used across all platforms you are using to communicate about your brand; include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In and any others you utilize.
Consider live video streaming your event for a fee or have a few sessions that are provided free on your website. Decide what content you will live-stream and what platform works best for your event. Look for features like the ability to view on a tablet or mobile and the ability to chat and ask questions as a remote viewer, as these are essential to engagement of the virtual audience. Assign one or two staff members to monitor and engage with the virtual audience before and during the event. The most common question regarding this is “Why would anyone come to my event, if I am streaming it?” There is nothing that can replace the relationships, brainstorming and camaraderie of attending a live event. Life gets in the way sometimes and we have to choose between attending a conference and being available for a family event, illness, or crisis. Throughout businesses and careers everyone juggles commitments. By providing a live stream in some manner, it allows those who cannot attend to be a part of the event in some way. As a franchisor, offering this opportunity is an indelible statement on the value of your franchisor-franchisee relationship. With this sneak peak of the event over live stream, it also creates envy and excitement to fuel the attendance at your next event.
Prepare social media graphics to be shared across platforms. Use photos or video testimonials from past events, photos of upcoming speakers, quotes of past or upcoming content, and always add the hashtag you will be using.
Create a Facebook Event Page, LinkedIn Event, or a separate web page dedicated to your event.
Share behind the scenes planning or bloopers to create excitement and anticipation for your convention.
Create a Twitter List of the speakers and another of all the attendees. This will allow easy follow up after the event and also an easy way to view everyone’s content.

During Your Convention

Take lots of pictures and video to post throughout the day. You will also use this content to promote your next convention. When you post your content, use your convention hashtag, tag your franchisees, their business pages, and use additional hashtags as appropriate. If you have sponsors be sure to include their signage or product and tag their social media pages as well.
Assign several staff members to post and re-share content throughout the day. Retweeting, re-sharing, favoriting photos and tweets is a full time job. Attempt to capture every attendee by the end of your event.
Have monitors set up in a central convention area with a stream of all the social media activity at your event. There are numerous services that can assist you to do this, one that aggregates hashtags across platforms currently is Tagboard.
Encourage your participants to live-tweet content, Instagram and Facebook from your event and remind them to use the hashtag. Having banners in each room or footers on the presentations with the hashtag helps to remind attendees what it is.
Have raffle prizes throughout the day for those that are posting on social media and for your virtual audience.
If you are live streaming be sure to engage with your virtual audience and allow them to ask questions of presenters through a chat function or bring them on through their computer camera to ask a question. Offer prizes and incentives for your virtual audience participation.
Consider using new technologies such as Periscope to share live snippets of your event to create buzz.

After Your Convention

Create a highlights video to share soon after the event and thank all of your attendees, followers, and sponsors. Be sure to tag sponsor pages and use the hashtag.
Your content becomes a living story of your event. Aggregate your content to share once again with a service such as Storify.
Debrief specifically on the topic of social media and engagement. What worked? What didn’t? What would you do differently next time?
Review your photos and videos to choose the best content to use to promote your next event.

For your next convention, choose a few ideas to take your engagement to the next level in this expansive playing field of social media. Your brand will benefit, you will set a great example for your franchisees, and most importantly your event will have a new degree of fun.

Susan King Glosby, CFE, is vice-president of operations for FIT4MOM. Find her at fransocial.franchise.com.