Participating in or organizing an event is a powerful way to engage with your audience. Whether it’s an office open house, a public service seminar, industry trade show or conference, an event provides you with a fantastic venue to convey ideas and create a lasting impression of your brand.

Social media is another great way to connect with individual customers and bring your brand to life. Today, businesses are combining the two by infusing social media tools and practices into their events. Events come with price tags, sometimes big ones; social media helps maximize the return on investment (ROI) for an event.

REACH
The first step in maximizing ROI is making sure news of your event reaches the greatest possible number of prospective attendees as possible. Typically businesses will do this by putting a note on their website, such as “see you at [Event Name], stop by and visit us at Booth #123!” Many businesses will also send an email or printed announcements and reminders to stay top of mind with prospective and confirmed attendees. Those are great first steps, but brands can do so much more.

ShareThis is a free tool to help virally promote anything on the web that has its own web address (URL). By adding a ShareThis button to an event page, you ensure that anyone seeing the page can easily let interested parties know about it; many brands even have their sales teams use the ShareThis function with all of their contacts.

Don’t hesitate to use the social media platforms you participate on to your advantage. Announce the event as early as you can, and tease it with details as they develop. Enthusiasm about an event can be contageous, but over enthusiasm can come across as ingenuine. Limit yourself to one exclamation point per post, and keep your CAPS LOCK set to off.


As the event approaches, you might consider adding incentives for viral sharing. Tools like WildFire can help create incentives for sharing your event on sites like Facebook and Twitter.


Let people share their plans to participate by giving the event a unique hashtag. A hashtag is a social media keyword that can be used on sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+. Hashtags start with a hash mark/pound sign (#), such as #2012PurpleOpen (note the lack of spaces). You’ll want to keep it short to leave room for the poster to write other stuff in their tweet. Hashtags can be used before, during, and after the event. Most tradeshows have their own hashtag so be sure you don’t create a competitor to the main hashtag for an event or you may not be asked back next year!

LIVE SHARING
It is common practice these days to post live from events. Early in social media this was called “live blogging”, but current social tools have embraced this convention so thoroughly that it no longer carries its own name.

Tools such as Twitter, Facebook and GooglePlus have built-in location/check in tools, and third party sites such as FourSquare make it possible for attendees to record their presence at a location. LocaModa has a great set of tools for events: imagine large projection screens with posts containing the relevant hashtags appearing on the screen (concert-goers will often pay for the opportunity to have their post appear on the show’s Jumbotron). It’s always a good idea to have a social media savvy photographer on hand posting images to your social media properties. Good pictures can make or break how an event comes across in social media, so be sure to hand the camera to someone whose photography you’ve seen and like.

QR CODES
Embedding printed materials and signage with QR codes at the event will enable attendees with smartphones to follow links to content on the web. These easy-to-generate codes are a wonderful way to make your event more interactive.

VIRTUAL ATTENDANCE
If your event is too far for some of your attendees to travel or if your space is too small to accommodate everyone you’d like to invite, you might consider offering virtual attendance. Using tools from UStream, Facebook, and Youtube, you can have streaming video from presentations and also field questions via tools such as Twitter.

AFTERLIFE
The best part about infusing your event with social media is that although the event is over, it is still ongoing online. Encourage attendees to post photos, top takeaways, insights, and reviews using your hashtag. This lets them help you create buzz for your next event. Create albums in social platforms like Facebook. Blog about the event. If your speakers gave presentations, make sure to post them for download on your site.

It is important to keep in mind that social media is not the entire solution. It is an integrated link in an overall linkage map connecting brands with their customers. Using social media in tandem with print and web-based initiatives, as well as events, will help bring your brand message to life.