In the event planning industry, people have always been social by nature, establishing personal connections at events. The channels through which these social interactions take place are changing in fundamental ways. Social media is impacting the meeting and event planner industry in important ways.
When it comes about important events, attendees will probably be talking about it before, during and after the event on these social sites. This will happen especially if your event has a large audience. Promoting events on social media is an efficient way to increase attendance since there are about 600 million people on Facebook , over 77 million on Instagram and 40 million on Twitter and the attendees can share information about the event you promoting with thousands of contacts at the click of a button.
One of the most advantageous aspects of social media for event planning is that users can select what topics they are interested in, becoming fans of pages on Facebook, joining discussion groups on LinkedIn, tweeting about specific topics and sharing the contents they like. This is a great way for event planners to target the ideal attendees based on their interests. Online forums allow attendees to communicate and share information, opinions before, during and after the event.
Mobile applications make social media sites easily accessible during live events. This will allow for those who weren’t able to attend the event in person to follow the live event and participate.
Also, there is a good chance that speakers at the events will be better prepared and deliver a great presentation if feedbacks about their presentation are posted on the Internet.
Participants are now empowered to become reviewers or even critics of the attended event. When the attendees have a powerful tool as social media they can easily and rapidly publish their feedback. Social media can create a good or bad reputation of any public event, so it represents a unique and efficient opportunity to improve your event's reputation and success.
Give the attendees the opportunity to be your advertisers, sharing their impressions and excitement about your event on their networks when they register.
Final Conclusions
Social media is present now everywhere from festivals, concerts, fashion weeks to conferences and sports events. The event planners of our days use social media successfully to promote their event, to share updates, to collect polls before the event and of course to sell thousands of tickets in an extremely short time.