This post is the third in a three-part series sharing my take on each question from a panel discussion at last week's Marketo Good to Great virtual event. On Friday, I covered my take on the hot trends in online events (spoiler alert: I said integration and content marketing). Today, let's talk about the key role social marketing is playing in modern webinars.
What effect is social marketing having on online events?
Social is helping marketers drive better results from their investments in webinars and touching every aspect of online events – from promotion to audience engagement to post-event.
Before the Event: Social Promotion
You can use social sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook not just as channels for promoting your event to your existing audience, but as a way to exponentially expand the audience for your event. We’re seeing more and more marketers include social sharing buttons on their webinar invitations, registration pages, and even reminder emails. This makes it extremely easy for prospects to share the event with their own social networks and has a real impact on results.
In fact, one of our customers increased registration numbers by 111%, blew away their registration record by a whopping 246 people, and nearly doubled their attendance numbers simply by adding social sharing buttons to their event-related emails and pages.
On a side note, did you know that ReadyTalk makes it easy to tap into your audience's social networks with our social sharing tools? Read more in my post on this topic.
During the Event: Engagement
Social – particularly Twitter – is playing more and more of a role during the live event as well and it can really help you keep your audience engaged. Here are a few tips for using Twitter effectively during your next webinar:
- Create a hashtag for every event and display it (and your Twitter handle) on every slide.
- Encourage your audience to join the conversation on Twitter.
- Have someone on your team live tweet the event and monitor activity on the hash tag.
- Display key messages on slides in 140 characters or less to make them easily tweetable.
For more tips on live tweeting a webinar, check out this recent post from ReadyTalk's Bo Bandy.
After the Event: Recording Distribution
Social can even play a role after your event. If you aren’t already, share the webinar recording on your corporate Facebook page, YouTube channel, Twitter, and relevant LinkedIn groups. This will help you reach more people and drive more leads from your event recording.
How else do you use social to make your webinars more successful?
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