Annual meetings are a great way to provide members with an experience that helps them connect with who you are as an organization.
It’s also an opportunity to make them feel engaged with you and a part of what you represent. Using social media for annual meetings and events can help enhance the attendee experience and bring about even stronger connections with attendees.
Here are four ways you can use social media with your annual meetings.
Promotion
If you want to incorporate social media into your annual meetings, the most obvious use would be promotion.
Support any direct mailing or email marketing campaigns that you are running to promote the event with social media. You can create hashtags to brand the event and make information easier to find. Create some recurring posts for your social accounts with the event info.
Get creative and design banners for the event that can be used in your posts. Remember, posts with images are twice as likely to get engagement as those that do not! The more engagement the posts about your event receives, the more likely others will see those posts as well.
Encourage Live Posting
After the promotional campaigns that run prior to the event have completed, you can use social media to communicate with attendees while the event is taking place.
Make all your attendees feel like they are truly participating in the event by encouraging them to post about the event in real time. If you have created a hashtag, make sure the hashtag is displayed throughout the event. This will help attendees post find and engage with each other’s posts more easily.
They’ll be more likely to feel connected to your organization as well as their fellow attendees, which provides a more encompassing experience.
It’s also a great idea to have someone on your team monitoring these live posts and to share and like them on your behalf to encourage even more activity. If you are using Informz Socializer, you can use the Sentiment Engine to get a better understanding as to how your attendees feel about the event.
Live Streaming Sessions
Live streaming your sessions can be a great way to expand the activities to more of your members. You may not want to live stream all your sessions (to provide more incentive for people to actually attend the event), but live streaming one or two might give a nice taste of what people can expect from these events. This might entice them to attend future events.
Another benefit is that attendees can also catch these streams on their mobile devices if they couldn’t grab a seat for the session. Make sure to get the permission of the speaker before streaming anything, and don’t forget to include your hashtag.
Run Contests
Do you have raffles or prizes for attendees? If so, try running social media contests as well to increase engagement with your members. Have attendees post about the event with special hashtags to make selecting a winner easier for you. This can be a great idea because it can generate excitement and positive sentiment at the event, as well as boost your social engagement, which is always a good thing!
Your members may be more likely to engage with a post about a contest than any of your other posts. By doing so, they’ll now be more likely to see and engage with your posts even after the event. This makes for some real fun, as well as giving them a stronger connection to your organization.
Have some fun with social media at your annual meetings! Use your imagination to think up memorable hashtags and contests to help attendees participate more fully with the event. The positive effects from this can be felt immediately at the event, but it can also have a lasting and beneficial impact on the reach of your future social media posts as well.
For more ideas, check out this guide for what to look for in a tool that will help you manage social media at your annual meeting.
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