With SXSWi kicking off today, we wanted to share some Social Intelligence tips to help you make the most of the biggest event of the year. Social Listening is the key to maximizing your networking experience at events and putting your brand at the top-of-mind of consumers. Even if you can’t make it to the event, social media efforts make it possible to follow along with the conversation and engage.

Social Listening will help you get the most out of events through real-time monitoring. You can easily grab valuable insights and pull overall demographics and geographics of event social influencers and participants. For each event, it is important to have a structured plan of social media monitoring before, during, and after the event. Here are some tips for making the most of your event experience, and creating awareness around your brand while setting the stage for becoming a credible and influential thought leader in your industry.

 

1. Pull pre-event data:

While it’s important to create a structured social media plan based on what your business wants to share, it’s also important to listen to what attendees want to see. Social media users often share what they are looking forward to at upcoming events, making it easy for marketers to adjust their social plans to meet these interests.

 

2. Listen to hashtags and keywords:

Use a Social Listening tool to look into which hashtags are being used most frequently. Usually, events will have one official hashtag and sometimes the individual sessions will have unique hashtags specific to the brand or the topic they are covering. All of the hashtags are generally found on the event’s website. Another way to easily find these hashtags is to look at the event Twitter page, industry influencers, attendees and speakers of the event.

3. Follow along with the conversation and engage with influencers:

  • Real-time social media listening tools make it easy to view multiple Twitter feeds at once. Influencer ranking helps by quickly showing who is creating the largest conversation on Twitter about the event. It even pulls geographic data and allows Social Listening users to find out where they are located.
  • Engage with industry influencers at the event by liking and retweeting. Even tweet at them and share relevant information. Oftentimes, it is beneficial to have employees use personal twitter accounts to answer questions or even suggest your brand’s sessions to attend.
  • Live-Tweet sessions with both the session-specific hashtag and the event hashtag. Use the event hashtag to tweet out content that will drive engagement.

Synthesio SXSWi Influencers

4. Measure your Social ROI

After creating long structured social media plans it’s important to measure your social ROI and understand the business impact of your campaigns. By implementing Social Listening KPIs, you will fully understand the social ROI of your event marketing efforts.

  • Volume: Volume of verbatim is the standard social media currency and the metric by which most social activity around events is measured.
  • Share of Voice: Volume requires context. Measuring Share of Voice among your competitors gives an indication of your brand’s talkability within your key markets and helps to set benchmarks and KPIs against which to measure future event activity.
  • Evolution: Enables you to see trends in your data. Long-term volume analysis helps you understand patterns and ascertain whether your event communications are having a sustained effect on volume.

 

Learn how Synthesio’s social listening platform can help you connect your social with business impact.