No matter how many times you share your event hashtag with attendees and blast out tweets and facebook updates as the organizer, there’s always more you could be doing to get even more visibility on Twitter, Vine, facebook, and beyond. The beauty of social media is that it allows event marketers to tap into the vast networks of each and every attendee, but as with most things worth desiring, there’s always a middle man.
For event professionals looking to increase their event engagement (and who isn’t), that middle man is each guest, and the medium of getting to their friends, co-workers, and circle of influence is through their smartphone. So, how can we tap into these resources aside from hoping that Twitter-obsessed attendees will need to share what they’re doing with the official hashtag? Or that vine-addicts will create some awesome 6 second snaps capturing how awesome the vibe is? Well, that’s where you need some incentive.
Some event innovators are taking to encouraging their guests to tweet and share by withholding gift bags until an attendee can show their hashtagged tweet on their phone. Depending on the audience, this might rub your VIP guests the wrong way, but with the right casual crowd of young professionals looking to network (i.e. at a trade show or panel discussion), it might make sense to encourage their 140-chararacter sharing or instagram love in return for a little bit of swag. After all, anything worth having comes at a cost.
For a non-profit organization or political rally, this tactic of leveraging swag to increase social media engagement has seen recent success, but if I was asked to share my personal opinions tied to a brand or organization on my personal social accounts, the swag had better be good, and I would have to feel pretty strongly about the mission of the organization.
Other less invasive tactics include offering additional prizes for the best pictures and videos, or featuring tweets on a live streaming projection screen in-event to tap into everyone’s secret desire to see themselves on a big screen. But this withholding swag thing? That’s a new one. With the right social media-crazed audience it could be a slam dunk accumulating more impressions for swag sponsors as well, but as with most marketing strategies, leveraging swag to increase social media engagement may not be one size fits all.
