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.

Although 82% of the world’s online population is using social media, over 60% of B2B companies aren’t using this medium to generate leads. Here are a few tips to take advantage of the large audience on these sites to drive quality traffic and convert that traffic to prospects.

• Tie social media lead generation into your content marketing strategy. Drive social media traffic to content on your website such as blog posts, white papers or webinars. Follow social media best practices. We have found success utilizing hashtags and @mentions on Twitter and tracking social media traffic using bit.ly links.
• Take full advantage of highly targeted landing pages. Make it easy for prospective leads to find your call-to-action and perform the required steps, whether it be completing an opt-in form or downloading a white paper.
• Build credibility and influence through your social media efforts. Monitor top industry keywords and jump into the conversation when appropriate.
• Don’t use social media solely for sales pitches. Provide content that is interesting and relevant to your audience and work to increase your credibility within your industry. Nurture leads until they have indicated that they are ready for purchase and are interested in your product.
• Utilizing CRM software, segment your social media leads the same way you do leads from other sources so you can better target them depending on their place in the sales cycle.

Social media can be a key source of quality sales leads when utilized properly. With a vast audience available at a relatively low cost, it is likely that more companies will soon be realizing its potential and optimizing their social media marketing for lead generation.

Looking to generate leads from social media? Contact Launch today! Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook to stay up-to-date with B2B marketing tips and trends.

Maintaining a social media presence can produce many benefits for a company, including increasing brand awareness and industry credibility, as well as generating leads and website traffic. In order to obtain the greatest benefits from social media, you should first develop a strategy for utilizing social media according to the goals that you wish to achieve. In addition to aligning your activity on social media to this strategy, here are a few additional tips:

• Post content that is both relevant and interesting to your customers
• Post regularly, but don’t overwhelm your followers with a constant stream of updates
• Curate original content on a blog and direct your followers there. Ideally this would be on your company’s website.

Unfortunately, not all marketers follow these best practices. Here are a few classic examples of what not to do, followed by ways each could improve.

1. Overwhelming Omar
He posts over 20 random updates on Facebook every day, but is surprised that his fan numbers keep falling.

Twitter is deceptively simple – all you have to do is create a tweet with fewer than 140 characters, throw in a few hash-tags, and post it – right?

Well maybe not. Judging from the amount of articles written on Twitter best practices it seems that people might be having a harder time than it appears creating posts that really engage people and incite them to act; ahem, re-tweet.

Having been a tweeter for some time now, I’ve observed a number of best practices that really do make a difference between somebody just hanging out and posting randomly, and someone taking their Twitter strategy to the next level.  Here are a few:

Who’s following whom?

When first starting out on Twitter, people will typically follow a large number of people in the hope that they will get followed back. This, however, sets them up for a misperception of value. For example, if you’re following 100+ people but only 20 are following you, it sends a message that you’re really not providing content or tweets of value. On the flip side, if you have 500 people following you but you are only following four or five, that sends an ego-centric message that you perceive your value to be far greater than perhaps it really is. And who likes a snob?

The golden rule of any social media effort is to engage people in a collaborative way. The best practice here is to follow a balanced ratio of people based on how many people are following you. As an example, if you have 500 people following you, you might follow 200 or so.  If you’re just starting out then follow a handful of people that you really want to engage with and enlarge the group as you build your followership via great content.

Good start.

Could be better – not quite wholesale arrogant, but close.

Perfect! Nice show of balanced reciprocation.

Populate a good profile – really.

Regardless of whether you’re tweeting for a corporate entity or yourself, the value of a good profile cannot be underestimated. Your profile tells people what your interests and focus are, as well as gives them clues as to the type of personality or tweeting style you represent. Think of it as your calling card – if it’s weak, then people will be more inclined to bypass or dismiss you quickly. A profile with a unique approach and some depth is a lot more intriguing. Here are a few examples of some good ones:

Are you on hash-tag overload?

Hash-tags are enormously valuable – until they clutter up your tweets to the extent that someone needs a cipher to break the code:

Yikes! Not only self-serving, but impossible to tell what it’s about other than a chat session. Pick your hash-tags carefully and incorporate only those that will keep your tweet in a particular conversation thread. Typically one or two hash-tags per tweet will suffice.

And, if you’re one of those that populates a random hash-tag to insert your tweet into a popular stream – that’s even worse.  Hash-tags serve a valuable purpose, but don’t be an abuser please! You might win short-term by getting your tweet in front of more people, but ultimately you won’t gain much. No one wants to read self-serving content that isn’t related to what they’re interested in.

Speaking of content – it really is king.

Twitter’s recent announcement of refinements to its’ Discover tab, which makes it easy for people to find information without following other accounts, is yet another step up in the content game. With the addition of enhanced personalization Twitter will now surface stories and tweets that are popular among those you follow, and those they follow as well, making the reach of content published on Twitter that much greater.

The goal of anyone generating content is to get it in front of as many people as possible, and tools like this make it even easier. But, you’ve got to generate great content that is relevant and compelling to people. Without that key piece, your best efforts are likely to be in vain as tools like Twitter’s Discover tab are based on connections – meaning a ranking of the content based on how many people shared it.

This goes hand-in-hand with the ultimate goal so many people have of generating a huge following. To date, the best way to do this is to consistently share great content and actively interact with people. This also means doing away with self-serving posts that do little more than pontificate about how great you or your company is or where your next lunch is taking place.

Are you an update maniac?

If you like to post a lot of tweets all at once, it’s time to step away from your computer. Seriously, posting a laundry list of tweets is just bad form. Some of you may argue that it’s just convenient to push out those great tweets you’ve been dreaming up all at once, but if you’re publishing more than a couple in one instance you’re setting yourself up to be un-followed, and fast.

Still not convinced?  Consider this – with more than 150 million (yes million) Tweets being published each day, it can be pretty hard to keep up with the flow. When presented with a list of tweets back to back from the same person, it’s highly unlikely that someone is going to take the time to digest your litany. Never mind the effort you took to create them – they’re probably not even getting read at all. Take the time to space out your tweets.  Great content, plus a steady, spaced out flow of tweets will keep you top of mind.

Looking for more tips on Twitter?  Check out this blog post. And be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook to keep up to date with our insider marketing tips.