How to Leverage Live Social Media Coverage at Events

Any time your company attends a conference or other industry event, it’s crucial to ensure you’re posting live social media coverage throughout your time there. As Stefanie Marrone shares, posting in real-time during events allows you to:

1. Grow your following from other event attendees
2. Showcase more diverse content
3. Build networking opportunities

Although posting during the event may feel like you’re flying by the seat of your pants and you’re juggling a lot of balls at once, there’s a lot you can do beforehand to prepare and ensure you’re getting the most out of your content. If you have an important event coming up that you’d like to be active on social media during, here’s what we recommend.

Managing Social Media at a Live Event

Select a Dedicated Point Person

Chances are your team members are going to be doing a lot of running around while at the event, especially if your company is presenting, leading demos, or exhibiting. This means that throwing the task of grabbing photos for social media and posting on the company’s accounts on their plates isn’t going to be the best idea, as it likely won’t get done. Their minds are going to be focused on speaking with potential clients and customers, promoting your company, and building connections with industry leaders — not remembering to take their phone out to grab a photo.

If possible, consider bringing a team member to the event who will be solely responsible for managing your company’s social media accounts during this time, whether that’s an in-house employee or a contractor. As this person’s biggest job will be to capture social media content, in addition to perhaps a few other small tasks, they’ll have the bandwidth to ensure it gets done, preventing anyone else from worrying about it.

Create a Shot List & Tag List

Brainstorm a list of all of the potential photos and videos you’d like to capture throughout the event. Depending on your industry, the event itself, and what your company will be doing at the event, this list will look different for everyone. Consider the following:

• Which team members from your company will be there? Make sure to get team shots.
• Will your team be showing demos at all? Capture them speaking with potential clients and customers.
• Do you have someone sitting on a panel or giving a talk? Record parts of their session.
• Will your company have a fun activation? Take photos and videos of people interacting with it.

You want to make sure to cover all of your bases, and don’t worry about taking “too many” photos or videos. Too many is much better than not enough, especially because you’ll be able to select the best ones later!

Additionally, if you know you’ll be taking photos or videos of or with certain people or companies, look up and keep track of their social media handles beforehand. You can keep them in a note on your phone, preventing you from needing to scramble to find profiles when tagging the right organizations in posts and looking up the same accounts over and over.

Purchase the Right Equipment

Although you certainly don’t need fancy, expensive photo equipment, having a few products to support your content creation can make all the difference. A few must-haves include:

• Wireless phone charger, as grabbing and posting content will drain your battery quickly
• Phone stabilizer to prevent shaky, uneven photos and videos
• Wireless lapels to capture high-quality audio

Toss these items in a backpack to make it easy to carry around with you. It’s also helpful to have your standard items, such as a laptop, additional chargers, and a notebook and pen.

Organize Visuals by Folder

When taking photos and recording videos, it’s really efficient to then organize them by folder within your phone so you can group the media of one topic together. This will make it easier for you to differentiate between subjects further down the line, in case you forget the exact details of a photo or video — especially if you plan on backing up the content to another drive in the future. It’s also helpful to add notes to each photo or video if needed, if you’d like to remember specific details for later.

For example, we attended a conference for the commercial furniture industry on behalf of a client and organized our media folders by showroom. We then uploaded these folders into a Google Drive folder that additional team members can access and use.

Prepare Posts in the Moment

Once you start capturing your content, you can begin to prepare your social media posts for publishing. Especially if you’re posting to multiple social media accounts, it’s helpful to prepare the caption in your Notes app and then copy and paste it over to each profile. If you’re simultaneously working from your laptop and your phone, you can easily sync the media to your laptop and use your desired social media scheduler from there for posting.

Don’t forget to refer to your previously prepared list of social media handles if the visual shows other people or companies, and tag any others you may not have already included. Additionally, if the event has a designated hashtag, use that on every post to increase your visibility and reach.

Engage with Other Attendees

Posting on your social media profiles throughout the event is only one half of the equation. The other half is engaging with other attendees’ content! You can find who else is at the event by scrolling through the event hashtag feed and interacting with relevant content from there. Doing so will quickly help to grow your social media following with like-minded individuals. You may even feel inclined to bring those new connections offline, too!

Analyze Performance

Analyzing the performance of your content and live social media efforts is one of the most important steps. Be sure to track your metrics before the event so you have data to compare to after the event. You’ll be able to see the increase in social media followers and website traffic as well as the specific metrics behind each post you published. This may influence your social media strategy moving forward and give helpful insight into how you may do things differently next year if you decide to attend the same event again.

Delegating Your Live Social Media Coverage

Work with a Marketing Agency for Support

If you don’t currently have someone in-house who would be able to manage on-site social media coverage for you, consider partnering with a marketing agency. As an expert in the field, they’ll be able to handle everything from developing an initial event strategy to capturing and publishing content to analyzing the performance afterwards. Did you know that this is something that we can do for you?

Reach out to Dash of Social for a free consultation to learn more about this service.