Social Media for Events

Social media (social network) event marketing

With the massive surge in popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, this is a channel that event marketers cannot afford to ignore. It's often an effective way to reach a very specific target market and to establish a loyal and sustainable client base. At INZIMO, we help you find the best way to tap into this market – from optimising individual and company profiles to paid advertising and viral campaigns.

Building communities

We believe the most valuable way in which social networking can be used in event marketing is in the creation of user communities. This can be done though existing platforms such as LinkedIn Groups or through a bespoke community site built for the event organiser. The most successful of these communities will appear to be non-commercial in nature and more of an independent platform for users who share a common business interest to meet, discuss and share information. In fact, much as they would do at one of your own live events.

Promotion of the event, conference or exhibition can then be done subtly and in a journalistic manor. The benefits to the event organiser over traditional DM is having a continuous dialogue with the customer and a database that effectively cleans itself. This can be a complex marketing strategy at first so please get in touch to discuss this in more detail.

Paid advertising

This works much in the same way as search engine Pay Per Click (PPC). The main difference is that the campaign manager will target adverts at a specific user group rather than keywords. This would factor in industry and job function in a b2b campaign or social status or circumstance in the consumer world. Budgets are capped and return is measurable.

Viral marketing for events

This works around a company creating ‘buzz’ or newsworthy messages, articles or anything that attracts attention. In the case of the business event industry, this could be something as simple as a video or recording of an interesting presentation to an announcement that something newsworthy is planned for an event. More in the case of consumer events, it could just be something interesting or funny that has the company’s brand or logo attached.

What makes this marketing channel so unique and exciting is that it is conversational, allowing direct dialogue between an event organiser and its target market. The ‘viral’ nature means your market will effectively market your event amongst themselves. This clearly makes it a powerful tool. It is essential, however, that the campaign fully engages and is respectful of its market to avoid costly backfires.

We believe that nearly every event should now incorporate some sort of social media strategy, so contact us if you would like to know more about using it in your event campaign.