Meeting Mondays: Social Media

As social media sites rapidly grow and evolve, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for the average person to really wrap their head around social media and process what it all means.

The Meeting & Event Industry has always been “social” by nature – whether it’s establishing personal connections at live events, understanding a client’s meeting objectives, or building a working relationship with vendors in order to negotiate better business deals in the future. However, the channels through which these social interactions take place are changing in some fundamental ways. For example:

·         Attendees will probably be talking about an event before, during, and after the event on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or uploading pictures of it on Instagram. Many of the members attending these events, whether it is large or small, may already be connected to one another on one of the above mentioned sites. If they are not connected already, they could connect with other attendees on sites like Twitter where if using a specific hashtag (e.g. #WEC2012)will show all other members using this hashtag indicating that they are at the event.

·         Promoting events on social media is a great way to drive attendance. For more social events such as a party or a concert, you are bound to be already connected to many of the people you are intending to invite. That way you can send out a mass invite to all of your friends on Facebook and voila you’re done. If you are hoping to get more people than your group of friends there are almost a billion people on Facebook, 100 million people on LinkedIn and 40 million on Twitter, common sense would tell you some of those people might be interested in attending your event.

·         Mobile apps are feeding the frenzy by making social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs easily accessible. This not only increases social participation of the live audience at the event but also allows those that weren’t able to attend to follow the live updates and engage. For example, various Olympic athletes have thousands of followers on Twitter, who are eagerly awaiting their new tweet.

Social media is allowing us to create new business opportunities and a better event experience by streamlining the interaction process and allowing us to engage with attendees, vendors, and clients on a daily basis rather than only when business comes up. How are some ways that you are utilizing social media to promote your business?