If you want to engage with your customers, promote your event and get your brand out there, then you must use social media throughout your event! Otherwise, how will people know about it…

Events are a great way to meet people, promote your business and engage with your community and social media only adds to this, follow the five simple steps below on how to create a solid event social media strategy.

1. Plan your day / content creation

Planning an event takes time, but one significant benefit of a planned event is that you know what is going to happen! This is why you should plan what content you want to create, in-line with the set schedule! You want to ensure that you catch all vital moments and pre-planning your content will allow you to do this.

Also, following a set plan will avoid the possibility of the nominated social media person becoming immersed in the event and not creating the content that was intended!

2. Delicate social media roles

Creating an event can take a lot of people from all different departments – one great way to get a unique perspective of the day is having different roles record their view of the event, e.g. the sound guy, host, tech team etc…This is a great way to make the content you produce from the event unique and varied.

If you have a small team, you should nominate one person to manage the social media and plan what content you want to create to ensure coverage of the whole event.

3. Its all about timing

You want to make sure that you post engaging content at the RIGHT time! Now, yes you want to create excitement and reveal what is coming up BUT you don’t want to post/tweet about something that hasn’t happen yet as people are less likely to engage with it and it may not get the reaction you hoped. Alternatively, if you wait too long, others may have posted the content and what you post won’t have a significant impact.

Events and social media are fast-paced; people are talking about what’s going on as it happens! Then once something new comes up, the thing that happened 2 minutes ago is old news! So, make sure that you’re the first to post and start a conversation with your audience.

4. Connect with your audience

There will be so much going on at the event; it is vital that you don’t get into the zone and solely focus on publishing content! Try to engage and start conversations on social media, ask questions and see what people are talking about. It’s great to respond to questions on social media to broaden your audience and build your social community.

5. Platforms

An event allows you to create a vast amount of content BUT it’s working out what content is right for specific platforms! When covering an event, live streaming platforms like SnapChat and even Facebook live are great tools that you want to utilise! Before the event starts you should work out what platform your demographic uses the most and also try to see how they behave on the apps, e.g. time they post/ engage.

More and more, users like to be involved in what happens, so try and think of innovative ways of including your audience, e.g. live Q&A with famous guest including questions from online audience, live sing along or online competitions they’re so many ways of engaging with your audience, you just need to find what way is right for you!