How to Improve Event Interaction with Social Media

Social networks long ago moved out of the realm of purely private use. Companies from all industries are taking advantage of the social web to better reach their customers, market products and generate awareness for their brand. Download this whitepaper to learn how to use social media to fuel event interactions.

Eight years after its founding, Facebook boasts 901 million active users each month – and more are joining every day. More than 170 million tweets are sent out each day. One year after its founding, Google+ reports 170 million users. Social networks long ago moved out of the realm of purely private use. Companies from all industries are taking advantage of the social web to better reach their customers, market products and generate awareness for their brand.

Yet how important are the networks in reality for the event industry?

Which networks are used? And what are the objectives for event organizers in using them? amiando, Europe‘s leading tool for online event registration and ticketing, once again this year took on the challenge of determining how event organizers use social media as marketing instruments, identifying the latest trends and investigating what problems have emerged. A comparison with the results from last year‘s reports is especially interesting, as it highlights several key shifts.

This report will also provide you with numerous useful tips on how you can apply social media even more effectively to marketing your events.

Socio-demographics

The online survey polled approx. 1000 event organizers. The respondents were 60% male, with the majority of them between 30 and 50 years old. 60% came from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, 10% from the rest of Europe, 10% from North and South America and 20% from other countries. 22% of those surveyed primarily organize conferences and congresses, 22% seminars, training sessions and courses, 13% corporate events; a further 11% indicated that they promote primarily concerts, festivals and nightlife events, while the remaining 32% were spread out among other, networking events, private events and trade fairs.

What importance do social media have as a marketing instrument for event organizers?

[Download PDF to see Pie Chart]

Social media continues to have a high importance to event organizers

To determine the fundamental attitudes on the part of event organizers regarding the importance of social networks, the question was posed to them about how important social media are as marketing tools.

he answers to this question were unambiguous: 73% of respondents indicated that social media is „very important“ or „somewhat important.“ Only 10% saw social media as „somewhat unimportant“ or „not important at all“ as a marketing instrument. This represented little change from 2011 — social media continues to remain highly important.

Summary:

The social networks continue to establish themselves as important communication channels for event organizers.

What social media channels are being used?

Facebook and Twitter remain the most important social media channels

Facebook remains the most frequently used social media channel at 84%, followed by the microblogging service Twitter, used by 61% of those polled. XING, YouTube and LinkedIn were also frequently used, with participation levels between 41% and 46%. What‘s remarkable is the strong interest in Google+, with 36% of respondents reportedly active on the relatively new platform. One sees however that the network has been unable to date to establish itself as a competitor to Facebook, and is used as a supplemental network to Facebook, not a replacement.

The values did not change significantly since 2011, excepting that blogs dropped 6 percentage points.

Tip:

Determine where your target audience is to be found. You should definitely pursue a multiplatform strategy to increase your reach even further. Google Analytics for example offers an effective way to determine the origins of the visitors to your website. You should search for participants, which could be interested in your event, in social networks and analyze the activity of competitors.

[Download PDF to see Bar Graph]

The greatest interest was in Google+, Facebook and Twitter

To determine which social media platforms are the source of the greatest interest, the question was posed as to which network event organizers are most interested in learning more about. The survey made clear that the greatest interest is in Google+. This could reflect the fact that the network is among the newest and event organizers had yet to gather significant experience with the platform.

Our survey indicates that Facebook and Twitter remain the most important social media channels. This could be a reason why the majority of event organizers want to learn more about Facebook and Twitter.

[Download PDF to see Pie Chart]

Activity levels, now as before, are being increased

The continually growing potential for social media can be seen in the answers to Question 3: 78% of respondents plan on increasing their social media activities in the future. 21% report that the activity levels will remain the same; only 1% is planning on cutting their activity levels.

It is interesting to compare this year’s answers with the one’s of the Social Media & Events Report 2011: 82% wanted to increase thei activity levels in 2011, while 17% had no changes planned. Several of those who wanted to increase their activity levels last year appear to have done so and are now satisfied with their revised activity level.

Summary:

The event industry continues planning on strengthening its social media activity levels. This is a clear indicator that event organizers continue to see enormous potential in networks

How much content do you publish each week on social media platforms?

[Download PDF to see Pie Chart]

Between one and ten posts per week

To pursue the desire for greater levels of social media activity, the number of times that content is published must be increased.

11% of polled event organizers publish no content whatsoever on social media platforms and can thus be classified as inactive. That is 3 percentage points less than a year ago. The majority of survey participants post between one and ten items per week. Compared with a year ago, the answers up to 25 (12%) and more than 25 (10%) published items per week on social media networks remained almost constant.

Tipp:

It must be noted that not just the volume and quantity of the published items are important; seeking out strategically advantageous times to post is also crucial, since otherwise the content may reach many fewer users than it should. The closer an event grows, the more relevant it becomes to participants and potential participants, meaning that you should post more content and info about the event.

[Download PDF to see Graph]

Increasing awareness the most important objective

Social media activity can pursue a variety of different goals. The answers to Question 5 indicated that the objectives for the event industry primarily reflect an effort to raise awareness about individual events (70%), as well as the brand as a whole (70%), and to increase customer loyalty (65%).

What‘s surprising is that only a third of those polled were trying to boost ticket sales.

Summary:

Increasing awareness is the most important social media objective for event organizers. You should try to increase your coverage of the target audience of relevance to you, and not just try to bump your Likes and Follower counts.

[Download PDF to see Graph]

68% average goal attainment Tip:

Some event organizers report having seen improvements in their goal attainment; from the list of potential answers above, roughly 40 to 76% of respondents reported initial successes.

The results of the survey show clearly that most of the participants were able to record at least initial success through social media marketing (mean value: 68%). The areas of much greater levels of success are interesting here: over 70% of those polled reported increases to awareness levels about their events and brand.

Tip

Constant performance review is of essential importance for social media activities as well. Determine in advance which KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you will be using to measure your progress.

Which factors are preventing you from harnessing the potential of social media?

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Lack of time is the biggest problem

Why are event organizers in some cases unable to achieve their stated goals for social media marketing?

Over 50% indicated that a lack of time is the main problem, followed by a lack of personnel and problems with clearly measuring the effectiveness of the measures. Only 12% expressed concern of running into potential image disasters as a result of their social media activities.

Summary:

Based on the responses, it is clear that event organizers see enormous potential in social media and are seeking to expand their activities. All the same, they appear not yet to have allocated the necessary resources for this.

Are you using monitoring tools to observe social media channels and track the success of your activities?

Only 39% use monitoring tools

Performance measurement is an essential component of any marketing strategy. For social media marketing, this means the use of social media monitoring tools. What‘s more surprising is that 50% of the participants use no such tools and a further 11% are uncertain whether their company uses any such tools. Only 39% (a slim 2% more than a year ago) indicate that they use monitoring tools.

Tip:

Create a program for monitoring your social media channel, as this will allow you to measure performance in real time and make it quicker and easier to react. If you are not yet using monitoring tools, start with free tools such as TweetDeck, as these are often sufficient to allow for performance measurement and realtime monitoring.

Which monitoring instruments are you using to observe your social media activities?

[Download PDF to see Pie Chart]

The majority of respondents use nocost monitoring tools

The 39% of participants who indicated that they use monitoring tools, were asked as a follow-up question which tools they use. They had the choice between commercial (pay) tools and free tools, with the pay-based tools then subdivided into in-house and external products.

It can be observed that a solid three-quarters of those polled use free tools. What‘s interesting is that unlike last year, some 5% more now use paid commercial solutions.

Summary:

When social media monitoring tools are used, it is primarily free tools. The reasons for this are not difficult to grasp, since professional paid solutions are tied to significant investments.

Key Insights

By comparing this year’s answers with the ones of the Social Media & Events Report 2011, many findings can be drawn.

Social media continues to represent an important marketing tool

Social media remains a very important marketing tool for event organizers. As already reported in last year‘s report, the most frequently used social media channels for event organizers are Facebook, Twitter and XING. Facebook remains far and away the social media instrument of choice for the marketing of events.

Key objective: Raising awareness

The most important goals for social media activities are raising awareness for individual events and for the brand as a whole. More than half of all respondents indicated that they had achieved these goals through social media activities.

Trust in social media marketing

The continually growing potential of social media can be seen in the fact that threequarters of respondents are planning on extending their social media activities in the future. Several of the event organizers who indicated plans in last year‘s report to expand their social media marketing strategy this year appear to have taken steps to do so and appear satisfied with the results. Few expressed the fear of ending up in a social media “disaster”.

Lack of time and personnel

The biggest problems are, as already indicated in last year‘s report, a lack of time, of personnel and issues related to the difficulty of accurately measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing activities. Due to the high investment costs involved with paid commercial monitoring tools, most event organizers use free tools.

How To: Social media tips for the event industry

To successfully implement a social media strategy, it‘s important to incorporate the time and personnel into your business plans and to compose a social media plan that lays out what will be posted and when over a specific period of time. This ensures that new content is posted on a regular basis. The plan should be oriented toward your other marketing activities and event planning, but nevertheless retain flexibility: if you discover a current, relevant blog article, you shouldn‘t wait too long before sharing it with your channel.

Define clear social media objectives: which target audience are you seeking to address? How do you want to present your company? How do you react to criticism and other feedback? Monitoring tools are recommended to measure the success of your efforts. Some are free (such as Socialmention, TweetDeck, Wildfire, Klout) and others are paid commercial products (such as Meltwater Buzz, HootSuite Pro, Trackur). Depending on your specific needs, it may be worthwhile to invest in a more full-featured tool with greater options for investigating the success of your social media strategy.

Post relevant, topical content

To keep the attention of your customers focused on your social media presence for the long run, it is crucial that you always have current, relevant content posted. This can be interesting blog posts, industry or company news, heads-up about upcoming events, photos from past events, or even infographics — the key thing is that your target audience feels personally addressed. It‘s essential that the content be kept up to date. Especially when it involves external content such as blog posts from the industry, it‘s quite likely that other companies from the industry with an overlapping pool of fans will already have posted a link if you wait too long. Be sure to post different types of content to stay interesting. Yet a happy medium should also be sought in terms of the frequency of posting: always keep the dialog moving, but do not overwhelm with information. Give your company a face and show your customers how things look ‚behind the scenes‘ by posting photos from everyday life in the office. This will give you company character and bring a sense of an open door policy and make you more sympathetic. Kipp Bodnar, a marketing strategist at Hubspot, postulated a “10-4-1 rule. Don‘t just promote your own events, but also those outside your company as well as industry-related content so that your users find your page interesting and ultimately subscribe. You should link 10 times to external content, such as interesting articles from industry bloggers, 4 times to your own content and one time to your own homepage.

Involve fans

Your social media strategy will be at its most effective when you involve as many people as possible with your entries through comments, ‚Likes‘, ‚Re-tweets‘ and ‚+1‘s. The articles then also appear in the newsfeed of friends of your fans, drawing further attention to your brand. You should thus animate your fans as often as possible to take part: post questions, ask for feedback — have visitors to one of your event share their photos afterward, for example. This shows other fans not just the success of the most recent event, but also awakens interest in future events.

[Download PDF to see Table]

Facebook

With more than 900 million users worldwide and roughly 23.7 million active users in Germany alone, Facebook is the network with the greatest reach. As such it is not surprising that it is also the network most frequently used among event promoters. For many companies, Facebook has become a cornerstone of social media marketing strategy; after all, with 3.2 billion „Likes“ and 300 million photos uploaded each day, Facebook represents a tremendous potential for marketing events.

Planning phase

Create a Facebook page for your event during the planning phase. The facelift for Facebook that went live on March 30, 2012 introduced the Timeline and many other new functions for the existing pages.

Event promoters now have the option of creating a large title image (851x315 pixels) and a profile image (180x180 pixels). Visitors to your page then see under the name of their event how many „Likes“ your page has and how many users are talking about your event. List all relevant information, such as the date your company was founded, your mission and a brief description of the firm in the upper section. The Timeline then provides your fans with information about the exact dates of major events or periods in your corporate history. This includes for example Milestone entries to denote key dates (including with an 843x403 pixel photo). Milestone entries can for example be the day of a major event, winning an award or the precise date on which the company achieved a certain number of fans. Your Timeline can also be used to hide certain stories and highlight others as especially interesting, and to sort your activities by year or type.

[Download PDF to see Image]

Create a location for your event using the Places function on Facebook. Visitors to your event can then ‚check in‘ to the event, indicating to their friends that they are currently at that event.

amiando offers you the option of selling tickets for your event directly via your Facebook page. It only takes a few steps to set up a ticket shop on Facebook. You can also then create an event on amiando and add in the amiando social ticketing app to your Facebook fan page. The integrated ticket shop means that Facebook can be more than just a marketing tool; it can serve as a sales channel as well. Experience more about the amiando Facebook app at http:// info.amiando.com/facebook-app.

During the event

If you want to post something on your page during the event but don‘t think you‘ll have the time for it, you can plan a posting for a future date. This ensures that all posts will hit the newsfeed for your fans at exactly the right time. To use this function you must indicate a founding date in the Timeline. You then create a post as normal, but instead of publishing it immediately, you click on the Clock symbol on the lower left to set a specific day and time for the post to go live. This has the benefit that you can plan your posts more effectively and don‘t have to be on Facebook at precisely the right moment to publish something in real time. The new function provides corporate social media managers with the added benefit of flexibility; they can create posts at convenient times without getting in the way of their other duties. This kind of post might include special ticket offers to your events, for example, as well as useful information such as the event location or information about speakers.

After the event

Once the event is finished, it‘s time to review and analyze performance. The newly redesigned administration area, found on the upper right side (above the cover photo), is designed for clear and easy use. You can hide it by clicking on the ‚Hide‘ function upper edge of the administration area.

The administrative area allows you to quantify your performance after the event, including export of the data into an Excel file, to help you more effectively pursue your targeted strategy. The data will indicate what your fans are most interested in, which topics they feel you should post more often, and whether the fans react more to photos or videos. Your uppermost goal should be achieving the greatest possible reach with your messages.

Post videos and photos from the event and move your participants to tag themselves on the event photos.

• Keep fans up-to-date

  Keep your fans up-to-date about your events on a regular basis, posting reports of between 100 and 250 symbols (less than 3 lines of text) at least three times per week.

• Current topics

  Pick up on topical themes (such as posts about vacation during the summer months) and link this message to your events. It‘s easier for your fans to remember current topics.

• Interaction

  Pose questions within your posts to increase interactivity on your pages.

• Post at the right times

  Use the administrative area to determine the day and time when you can most effectively reach your fans, and post at those times.

• Impressions

  Show your fans impressions from your side and offer a peek behind the scenes of your events. Give away tickets to your events in thanks for fan loyalty.

• Sweepstakes

  Sweepstakes are a good way to generate more traffic to your fan page. Be careful to watch for potential legal issues, however.

Twitter

There are more than 140 million users of Twitter worldwide, including four million in Germany. The microblogging serve is growing in importance as a marketing tool for events and is an established component in an integrated social media strategy. Twitter can be used in all three phases of event management.

Planning phase

During the planning phase ahead of your event, you should create a Twitter account and a hashtag (#RelevantPhrase). This is typically the name of the event. Always check on Twitter to make sure the hashtag isn‘t already in use elsewhere. Actively publicize your event and the hashtag you‘ve created on your homepage and via other existing communication channels. Hashtags have the benefit that they turn up information about the event in a bundled manner, and because interested parties and participants can tweet about the event using the hashtag themselves. Twitter offers a hashtag button that you can integrate onto your event page so that each tweet posted via the button automatically includes your event hashtag.

Twitter has also announced what will be known as hashtag pages, which will be of major interest for events. Hashtag pages are dedicated to a specific hashtag and can be edited and adapted by an admin. The first hashtag page is dedicated to #NASCAR. You can see it at https://twitter.com/hashtag/ nascar.

Twitter behavior is independent from the size of the event; what‘s important is how much information you as the event organizer can make available on Twitter (see also the amiando study on „Twitter for Events“). If you post a high amount of information, then many users can re-tweet that information as well.

During the event

Prior to the event you should tweet all important information, always in 140 characters or less, such as the event location, the precise time and the program. Post documents about the event on Twitter.

During the event, you should create a Twitterwall (such as twitterwallr.com) that shows all the tweets containing your event‘s hashtags in chronological order. Post during the event about lectures, topics, program changes or general impressions of the event. Those interested in your event then are informed immediately, even if they haven‘t visited it. Non-visitors can also re-tweet interesting discussions. Create flyers for the event informing visitors about the hashtag. The more tweets that are posted about your event, the better. Stimulate Twitterers to post about your event, such as through automatic inclusion in a sweepstakes for those who tweet.

What‘s important is that you as event organizer follow your tweets and respond immediately to questions and critical commentary. You can send this on Twitter as direct messages that are not public visible, but the person must be following your Twitter account and vice-versa.

After the event

After the event you can for example make available free interviews, images and video material so that your event stays a topic of discussion. The percentage share of Tweets is somewhat higher after the event than before the event, due to the provided info materials that your visitors can download (see amiando study „Twitter for Events“).

• Twittergrader

  Check on Twittergrader how influential your Twitter users are (http://tweet.grader.com/)

• Build relationships

  Pay attention to your power users. Power users post a great deal of content on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and have a very high number of followers or fans. Establish relationships to your power users, since they can serve as valuable opinion leaders for your events

• Greater awareness

  Place your event on the social media event marketing platform TweetMyEvents (http://www.tweetmyevents.com) and generate greater awareness.

Xing

XING is the social network for professional contacts. Over 12 million members use the internet platform worldwide for business, jobs and career. With 5.5 million specialists and managers on XING, it is the largest professional network in the German-speaking world. As a professional network, the focus at XING is on the exchange of knowledge on businessrelated topics, such as event marketing, and the search for suitable employees and career advance, even from an existing employment situation. Thanks to the integrated tool from amiando, members of XING can create events easily and intuitively. If the event includes a fee, amiando handles invoicing and simplifies numerous other processes.

Planning phase

The option is available to create XING events of professional relevance. The most suitable candidates for this are conferences, seminars and networking events, since they can achieve large coverage within their relevant target audience. If the event is created as a public event, then the event is automatically shown to users for whom the event matches their profile interest as potentially of interest.

Beyond these automatically generated recommendations, XING also offers multiple options for actively promoting your event: You can share within your network (and on Twitter and Facebook), invite your XING contacts directly and harness viral effects: positive responses to events by participants appear in their activity stream, so that the rest of the network learns about it.

[Download PDF to see Image]

Starting in August 2012 — initially for the German market only — a new tool will be published for marketing events on XING. This the XING AdCreator, a tool that can be used to create ad banners for your event on your own, as well as selecting the right target audience and performance measurement. The audience targeting function can be individually filtered for regions, industries and interests and allows the use of various images and texts for the campaign to increase its performance. XING offers four packets for invoicing: three of those have a fixed price per placement and a maximum budget; the flex package includes a price per thousand placements for an individualized budget. The benefit of this is that only actually placements of the ad are paid. Once booked, your ad is then shown to the relevant target audience in prominent places on XING.

During the event

Contacts that you make during the event can be added as contacts before the event is even over using XING‘s mobile site, establishing the basis for long-term relationships. The mobile handshake from XING is perfectly suited for this.

After the event

A good conversation starter for your new contacts is asking for feedback about the event. Later you can plan projects together, or invite these persons to similar events. Found groups that fit your event and invite your contacts there. In the future you can also deliver info about your events and invite other contacts.

idea:

• Create your event and sell the tickets directly via XING.
• Post information about your event in your XING network.
• Use XING AdCreator and promote your event through ads that reach your target audience.
• Post information about your event in relevant XING groups and increase your range in that way.
• Link contacts to events and network via XING.

Pinterest

Pinterest went online in spring 2010 and is one of the newest social networks.

On Pinterest users can not just upload their own images and videos, but also collect images from the internet to be shared on Facebook and Twitter. The various images can be sorted into different albums known as boards.

Other members can see not just persons, companies and brands, but also follow boards to see the latest images from albums.

Planning phase

You can only use Pinterest if you‘ve received an invitation to the social network or have a Facebook or Twitter account to use as a log in.

Fill in the field „About“ as precisely as possible and use as many keywords as possible, since that text is shown in search engines. Use the same email address for Pinterest that you use for your Twitter business account. Check that your homepage has meaningful, highresolution images that can be further pinned. Activate the Pinterest sharing button — ‚pin it‘ — to go with other share buttons.

If you plan an event with different conferences, you should create a board for each conference. Individual boards can focus on dining, drinking, parties or day trips for your event. Visitors can thus inform themselves in advanced about the event through attractive photos.

If you‘re planning an event that you‘ve already organized at least once before, use the photos from the previous year. Attractive photos help you make not just other visitors aware of your event, but can also help win potential speakers for your conference.

[Download PDF to see Image]

Contemplate which categories your visitors search through to find an event like yours and create boards using those meta-labels; you can only have one board per topic, though.

During the event

During the event you can publish meaningful images and videos that can be further pinned and share these on Facebook and Twitter via Pinterest. This provides interested parties with an impression of your event, even if they are not at the event itself. Hang posters around your event to encourage visitors to follow you on Pinterest. It is not yet clear from a legal standpoint about whether you may pin images for which you do not hold copyrights. You should thus be sure to pin only images on your board for which you own copyrights or where you have received consent from the copyright owner.

After the Event

Pin your images and videos after the event on your Pinterest page. Create a short description for each photo and link the image to your homepage. Take care that the images text and videos have metatags to ensure that they can be located by search engines.

Foursquare

The geolocation network Foursquare allows you to market your event through Location Based Services (LBS) and address your customers directly. Foursquare boasts over 20 million users worldwide, checking in to different locations using their smartphones.

Foursquare users have the opportunity to create a profile on the platform (max. 160 characters) and inform their friends via mobile check-in where they currently are. Users can also perform a check-in to earn various awards and collect points. The user decides whether his check-ins are shared on social communities like Twitter or Facebook. Awareness of an event can thus spread very quickly via word of mouth, since the information about a check-in is shown to the user‘s friends. Those friends can see for each check-in who else also checked in at the location and any tips the friend recorded about the location.

Planning phase

Foursquare is simple to use for the marketing of your events and raises awareness of your event through word-of-mouth propaganda. Tie your mobile marketing to your social media activities and create a profile for your event in Foursquare during the planning phase. Be sure to include your Twitter account and the precise address where the event should take place. Create specific locations for your event and give various tips for different spots. This might mean a tip about a coffee cart at your event where users can have a free cup of coffee for checking in, or recommend a specific drink.

[Download PDF to see Image]

During the Event

Use the „Tip“ function to provide fans with the latest updates. Place posters and standees to inform your event visitors during the event that they can check in to the event using Foursquare. With the aid of special offers and coupons you can motivate your visitors to check in to your event and post that they have done so on Facebook or using a #hashtag, on Twitter. One potential example of how to motivate your visitors is to offer anyone who checks in to the event with four friends and tweets the #Eventname a coupon for the next concert that you organize.

After the event

After the event you simple delete the event from Foursquare. Check after the event how many visitors have checked in to your event and what you can improve for the next event. More event promotion tips for Foursquare can be found on the amiando blog.

With four billion video views per day, Google‘s YouTube is the world‘s biggest and most famous online video portal. Use YouTube to market your event.

You can address internet users on YouTube before, during and after the event:

Planning phase

Get started early to create interest among users. Publicize the latest updates about your event, post a teaser clip, or perhaps conduct interviews with invited speakers or exhibitors. This also makes it possible to collect feedback and commentary from users about the event. Create a YouTube channel by registering directly with YouTube or link your Google account YouTube. Be certain to always include the name of your event in your channel to make it easier to find.

Design your channel to match the brand appearance for your other social media profiles and don‘t forget to include as much information as possible about the event. Publicize videos that you post on YouTube to all of your other channels, such as Facebook and Twitter. Ensure that your channel and videos are always appended with a sufficient quantity of appropriately descriptive meta-tags so that they can be easily found on YouTube and via search machines. You can also advertise your channel using AdWords campaigns.

During the event

YouTube affords the opportunity to stream your event live. Note that you must activate the live streaming function on your YouTube channel in advance. This allows you to reach users who are not attending the event. You can also post short videos about the event to keep interested users informed on the latest.

After the event

Edit together a video after the event summarizing the highlights. Post that video on YouTube as well. Visitors to your events are then afforded the chance to look back on the event and forward it on to friends. The videos also offer a good opportunity to advertise your next event.

Read on our blog about interesting elements of YouTube and event marketing.

Google+, online since June 2011, is the newest of the social networks. With approximately 170 million users, Google+ has not succeeded in knocking Facebook off its perch as most popular network, but it has received a great deal of attention and is currently functioning as a parallel supplement to Facebook. The primary attraction is the Circles function that allows the user to divide up his or her contacts conveniently into groups. This means that any given posting can be shared only with specific contacts, avoiding sending too much information to contacts for whom it is not relevant. Depending on the type of your upcoming events, this allows you to target your message much more directly.

Google+ is especially well suited for distribution of individual images, such as infographics, photos of events and diagrams. As with Facebook, images appear in the news stream for your contact; but instead of building entire albums, individual photos are shared, with the image featured more prominently than on Facebook. The minimalist, clean design of Google+ turns attention strong toward shared content. The „+1“ button makes it easy to rate comments, posts and content.

Google+ also offers the opportunity to participate in video conferences (so-called „Hangouts“): participants can simple add in their Gmail addresses. The impact of Google+ shouldn‘t be underestimated, since Google takes into account the user-generated content from its social networks when it personalizes its search results. This means that interactions between users and their content influences how prominently those events are featured in search results.

Create a Google+ business page

Administer your Google+ business page from a Gmail account to which multiple persons have access. On Facebook multiple persons can be given administrator rights to your page, but this is not possible on Google+.

[Download PDF to see Image]

You can set up your own business page at https://plus.google.com/pages/create. Select „Company, Institution or Organiza tion“ and enter the required information: name of the page, company website and a category. You can also opt to restrict the visibility of your page.

During the next step you can adapt your public profile. Of special importance are the tagline (a brief description of your company/event) and a photo (such as your logo).

Once these two simple steps are completed, the basic foundation for your site is in place. It‘s nevertheless recommended that you flesh out the page with more information and relevant content before starting to promote the site.

Google+ and search engine hits

Google indexes information from your Circles to determine where the interests of your contacts lay. It also determines what kind of content you are distributing, which contacts are especially important and which topics are current for your Circles. This all improves the search engine results. The more Google+ followers and +1 votes your site gathers, the higher your Google ranking. This makes it easier to find and increases your chances of being located by potential customers and participants of your event.

Google+ Events

Google+ recently added a separate event function. You can design invitations using templates, share photos taken during the event with your Circles directly from your smartphone and set up a photo album for guests to upload their own photos. The direct link to the Google calendar is also helpful.

Last but not least

We hope that the 2012 Social Media & Events Report has highlighted the importance of social media as a marketing instrument for the event industry.

The various examples and data from the online survey were intended to show how best to market an event using social media.

We are always glad to hear your success stories, comments and examples of solid social media marketing in the event industry for inclusion in future reports. Let us know what you think: report@amiando.com