Social media provides a real-time outlet for customers to interact with your company, and trade shows or conferences are great times to utilize social media to enhance your presence at these events.

In addition to allowing attendees to interact with your brand online, social media event promotion encourages interaction among event attendees and extends your message far beyond those who actually attend your event. This means your marketing messages will have a greater impact than just to event attendees alone.

Here are 5 social media platforms with key ways to use them to boost your next event.

1. Twitter

Twitter’s strength is the real-time nature of the platform. Create an event hashtag for attendees to use (and let them know what it is by promoting it heavily in your conference marketing materials). This way, it is easier to track conversations that may be taking place. These tweets also provide you with great content for your corporate Twitter account.

2. Foursquare

Foursquare’s location-based technology offers companies an opportunity to further interact with those who are at the same trade show or conference. Creating a check-in spot at your booth can spread the word about your presence, as each check-in will be shown to that person’s network. Also, Foursquare recently introduced a new update that allows business owners to post updates that are shown to users who are connected to the company on Foursquare. This can be utilized at events to update booth visitors on your company’s activities at the trade show or any special promotions you might be having.

3. Instagram

Instagram’s visually engaging platform and integration with other social media networks make it an ideal place for companies to share trade show/conference photos. Encourage attendees to use the same hashtag they use for Twitter when they upload photos to Instagram. That way you can utilize them as content for other marketing materials. Consider these examples of creating a “Top 10 Instagram Photo” blog post or a gallery of the best Instagram photos that are posted using the hashtag.

4. SlideShare

SlideShare offers brands the ability to upload presentations or other documents. It is a great platform to share keynote or breakout session presentations after the conference is over. You may consider offering tidbits of the presentations to the public while keeping the full presentations exclusively for attendees. Read our blog post for more tips on using SlideShare for B2B marketing.

5. YouTube

Much like SlideShare, YouTube can be a great place to share presentations that occurred during the event, except in video form. Besides the presentations, consider creating videos of other things that occur during the event such as awards presentations or fun outings. Showcasing these other aspects of the event besides the presentations gives your event a personality and serves as another enticing aspect to attract attendees for your next event.

Parting Words

As you can see, social media can play a key role in your brand’s strategy for a trade show or conference presence. By integrating various social media outlets, you have an opportunity to portray your brand’s personality and extend the reach of your message beyond the walls of the conference center.

Need help with the social meeting strategy for your next event? Contact Launch today! Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook to stay up-to-date with B2B marketing tips and trends.

SlideShare attracts over 29 million unique visitors each month and hosts over 7 million presentations, with 1,140 slides viewed each second. After LinkedIn’s recent multi-million dollar acquisition of SlideShare even more attention is being drawn to this website. As some marketers have already discovered, SlideShare can be an effective vehicle for a successful content marketing strategy.

SlideShare provides marketers with a central outlet to host their content library that customers and prospects can be driven to. Additionally, SlideShare presentations can be embedded on a corporate website, a quick and easy way to provide visitors access to the content.

Jennifer Burnham of Salesforce says that SlideShare is “like a virtual library” for the various types of content that they produce, and uploading content to SlideShare “extends its reach and lifetime value.”

Hosting content on SlideShare is an easy way to make sure that a company is among the top organic search results for relevant topics, as SlideShare will optimize the content for SEO purposes. Since these documents are usually content-heavy, they will be likely to rank in the top search results.

SlideShare can also be used as an effective way to drive traffic to a company’s website or social media outlets. With so many visitors to its website, SlideShare can generate a large number of views for uploaded presentations. Placing links throughout the presentation and on one’s SlideShare profile provides an outlet to bring these viewers to the company’s website. Additionally, SlideShare offers companies the option to embed forms into their presentations, providing them with another method for generating leads. They have also introduced additional features such as video hosting and Zipcast web conferencing.

For more B2B marketing tips, check out our B2B resources page and be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.