Social Media is the key to B2B Event success, here’s why.

Maximising interest and attendance is no easy feat. Luckily, social media offers a time and cost-effective solution to ensure your event is bustling and buzz-worthy. Leveraging social media unlocks many ways to generate interest, drive attendance and increase engagement among the right people for your event.

Not all platforms are created equal – When it comes to event marketing this notion could never be more true. The titans of the social media industry are constantly finding new and exciting ways for marketers to connect and resonate with their audiences. For event marketers this creates fresh opportunities to engage with potential attendees. Which platform should you be using to market your event? Let’s compare a few to see which best suits your event marketing goals:

Facebook

The beauty of Facebook is that it offers a variety of content formats which affords even the least creative marketer the opportunity to create truly immersive content. The platform’s Events Page option makes spreading the word about your event easy, a few clicks will have you all set. These attributes combined with Facebook’s large active user base (recent statistics show over 1.94 billion monthly active users) make it the perfect solution for increasing brand awareness and reach.

A key feature for event marketers is the ability to serve highly targeted ads based on age, gender, location and even interests. This ensures that your budget is spent reaching people most likely to attend your event using a multitude of engaging ad formats to appeal to your audience. Add to this Facebook’s lookalike audience feature, which creates new audiences based on your existing ones, and you’ll be reaching more potential attendees with minimal effort.

Twitter:

With 313 million monthly active users churning out around 500 million tweets per day(or 6000 tweets per second), I’m pretty sure Twitter could finish the Kessel Run well under 12 parsecs. The ability to retweet on the fly is a simple solution to holding your audience’s attention by providing them with fresh content, it also provides a great opportunity to increase your engagement while promoting other brands involved with your event.

When it comes to event marketing, Twitter’s rapid rate of information exchange coupled with its live video streaming functionality(powered by Periscope)makes it the perfect tool for live event coverage. Twitter’s live video option not only adds “in the moment” value (which has proven popular with social media users) but also another layer of engagement for those attending.

LinkedIn:

Often perceived as just a plain old business networking channel, the Microsoft-owned platform boasts over half a billion active users and offers event marketers a unique way to connect with industry professionals and thought leaders. Its Advanced People Search function, with a wide array of filters, makes for a truly refined way of finding high-quality potential attendees.

LinkedIn Groups not only provide a way to funnel potential attendees to a central location but also a chance to create a network to engage with on a professional level about industry-related matters, allowing you to gain first-hand insights about your audience. A LinkedIn Group’s intimate nature allows marketers to message members individually which is great for event invites as it adds a much appreciated personalised touch.

So, which of the three is the right one for you? While each channel has its own set of strengths that can be leveraged to enhance your event’s online presence and potentially increase foot-traffic, the key to winning in the events marketing game lies in collaboration. Through cross-platform marketing you’ll gain access to a much larger audience, have a wider array of tools at your disposal and engage with those who matter to you most on the platforms they frequent. Used together, and with a well-defined social media strategy, these platforms can become your ultimate weapon to ensure your event is a roaring success.

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Eric Louw

CLIENT SERVICES DIRECTOR

Some people are just destined to market B2B events. Eric is one of those people. It’s not because he’s passionate about B2B events (that’s a given), it’s because he’s passionate about helping B2B event organisers maximise their marketing budget with digital marketing tactics.

Talk to an expert

Eric Louw

CLIENT SERVICES DIRECTOR

Some people are just destined to market B2B events. Eric is one of those people. It’s not because he’s passionate about B2B events (that’s a given), it’s because he’s passionate about helping B2B event organisers maximise their marketing budget with digital marketing tactics.

Talk to an expert