By: Adrianne Miller, Account Manager

Last week, three members of the RBOA team road tripped to Orlando for a client conference, FETC 2013, the content-rich conference that brings education leaders and technology experts together to exchange techniques and strategies for teaching and learning success. The RBOA team was responsible for manning the press room and maintaining FETC’s social media-sphere, a well-oiled machine resulting from an established social media strategy (a must have for all public relations pros).

After a successful week of Twitter tweeting (and trending), Facebook sharing, LinkedIn discussing, YouTube subscribing, Foursquare checking (in) and hanging out on Google+, we returned to Tallahassee with a renewed understanding of the value of event social media engagement (and a few FETC mugs and t-shirts).

Social media is an essential component for client events. It can help promote events, enable attendees (and exhibitors, sponsors and speakers) to connect and empower attendees to share prior, during and after the event. Here are four ways you can infuse social media into your next event:

Create a presence: Whether you’re on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (insert ANY social network here) or all of the above, it’s important to generate event buzz across all platforms to establish a broad presence. Turn your social media platform(s) into the go-to source for event details like registration updates, hotel booking options, sponsor listings, speaker details and more. Promoting online registration across the platforms makes the process more convenient and efficient. Sharing details about event sponsors allows friends, fans and followers to possibly “like” or “follow” these groups and organizations; and sharing speaker details allows attendees to connect with speakers prior to attending or during the event. Creating event familiarity will put attendees at ease.

Build community: Once you’ve created your event presence and established your social media platform as the go-to source for curious attendees, begin to build your community. It’s no mystery that people enjoy talking about themselves and their plans, so by encouraging friends, followers and fans to engage in conversation, connections will be created. Post polls and ask questions to generate interaction within the digital crowd. Asking a simple question like, “Which speaker did you enjoy the most?” encourages users to share their thoughts and opinions while bonding over common interests.  Encouraging your social media crowd to share their event highlights or photos lets them know their feedback is welcome and valuable. Users are more likely to return to your social media platform if they’ve made “friends” or shared personal content. The power to share goes hand-in-hand with the power to spread the word. Let your users do the work for you.

Generate a buzz and track conversations: It’s important to establish an event hashtag if you’re promoting your event on Twitter so that you can track the conversations. Once you’ve determined the event hashtag (and double checked to make sure the desired hashtag is not already in use), spread the word across your platforms by saying “Join the conversation on Twitter using #XHASHTAG (for FETC, we used #FETC). By establishing a hashtag, Twitter followers can track all conversations regarding the event AND you can monitor the content. Once the conversation is up to speed, generate good Twitter karma by retweeting, mentioning and replying to the engaged users.

Follow up (and begin again): Now that you’re friends, fans and followers are engaged in the buzz, you don’t want to leave them high and dry after the event. Go out with a bang by thanking conference attendees, sponsors, exhibitors and speakers for their attendance and wishing them safe travels.  Continue to encourage interaction by asking attendees to share about their experience and/or post photos of their trip. The feedback will shed light on what fans and followers took away from the event and help tweak future events based on candid feedback. Keep track of news coverage of the event (Google Alerts) to share media clips with the virtual crowd. Find out if presenters and speakers have posted their materials to online platforms like Edmodo, YouTube or Slideshare, and direct fans and followers who want to go back for seconds to those websites.  And finally, if there is a set date for the next event, share it! Encourage users to save-the-date for your next event.  Chances are, they’ll be back for details, and you’ll be prepared to share them!

Now that you’re equipped with your social media strategy, you’re ready to tackle any event and create a notable buzz. Godspeed. . .