Whether you rent iPads for attendees or rely on the use of their smartphones, most of your event's exposure to the virtual world will be within the social postings at your conference. In a recent blog post, Leo Widricha Co-Founder at Buffer, a social media aggregator company, provided great tips that can help any meeting gain better digital exposure when using Twitter, Facebook and a blogging platform.

Here is a synopsis of what he wrote about and my own takeaways as they apply to the meeting industry.  

twitterTWITTER

Twitter is more challenging than the other social channels for two reasons: 1) It allows only for textual displays and 2) Your attendee's message is limited to 140 characters.

Here are 3 ways to position your meeting tweets to be retweeted or favored: 

  • Buffer analyzed over 200,000 links and found that tweets containing adverbs and verbs had higher Click Through Rates (CTR) than those containing nouns and adjectives. Here are some of the more retweetable words:

    • Adverbs: Please, Free, How to
    • Verbs: Retweet, Help, Follow, Top, Check out
  • According to Twitter, when you ask for a download, it increases your clicks by 13%
  • When you ask for a retweet, it increase retweets of that post by 311% according to Twitter. 

facebookFACEBOOK

With Facebook, one truism remains: Pictures outperform everything else — including videos, URLs, and textual posts.  But according to Buffer, pictures that are self-explanatory are the ones that do the best. 

  • Photos receive:

    • 104% more comments
    • 84% more click-throughs and 
    • 53% more likes than posts with text and/or links. 
  • Posts with 80 characters or less receive 66% more engagement.
  • The more you mention "I", the more likes you can get according to Dan Zarrella, a Social Media Scientist.

BLOG

According to Iris Shoor, Co-Founder and VP Product at Takipi, the best blog post headings contain the following: 

  • Lists work well: "8 reasons to…" or "15 tips to…" (By the way, both of these descriptors contain verbs)
  • Use digits vs. words: 10 instead of Ten
  • Put the number at the head of the sentence: "5 reasons you want to attend this event" versus "You want to attend this event for the following 5 reasons." 
  • Teach: Introduction, The beginner's guide, 5 minutes to and DIY are all good starts to a headline. 
  • Viral Headlines include one or more of the following words:

    • Smart
    • Surprising
    • Science
    • History
    • Huge
    • Critical

PRODUCTIVE EVENT PLANNER TAKEAWAYS…

  1. Encourage attendees, speakers, sponsors and exhibitors to sign up for Facebook and Twitter if they do not already have an account. 
  2. If your speaker's have white papers or presentations, let attendees know they can download them via Twitter. Here is an example: 

    Great find – Download this Free eBook on Conference Networking http://t.co/LoMBgxOLBJ via @velchain #eventprofs #mpi

  1. If you rent Tablet PCs, pre-populate the units with the social channels that make sense for your meeting.
  2. Run Social Media 101 sessions for individuals who do not know how to post on social and educate them on the items listed above. 
  3. Ask attendees to retweet content that is posted in the meeting's hashtag. 
  4. Ask meeting participants to post as many photos as possible on your Facebook Fan Page, but make certain they are self-explanatory. 
  5. Identify guest bloggers for your conference and send them a "cheat sheet" of words and items they should include in their blog postings. 

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