Why you should use social media support for your events.

Thousands attend events and trade-shows each year and make great advocates for future events.

Live social media support during events and/or trade-shows can greatly increase your social media presence. It sounds pretty obvious when you put it in black and white, but so many people experience this “aha” moment when they hear all about live social media support and why it's so useful for events.

Recently we had the opportunity to provide live social media support for Mishka Productions and their Celebrate Your Life conference in Chicago. The conference featured some of the world's most influential spiritual speakers and drew people from all over the world to spend three enlightening days listening to these authors speak about improving their lives.

While we were there to hear some of the speakers, we found ourselves constantly uploading pictures and videos throughout the event and even posted comments from attendees that we ran into. We took pictures of authors signing books, people meeting authors, people hugging people, just basically anything that we felt the rest of the world needed to see.

After the event, we looked at our statistical data on Facebook and was very impressed! Our interaction levels grew by over 600% during the days of the event (mostly picture and video views) and our unique page views went up by 100%. Unique page views are a great thing because they mean new visitors! Our follower numbers were on the up as well. Overall, it was very evident that live social media support was a huge boost to Mishka's presence on the social scene and we were happy enough about that so we decided to do it again in November for the conference in Phoenix.

It's easy to see with this screenshot, the overall effect that live social media support had on our interactions.

This time we are going to be adding in a lot more bells and whistles. Our dedicated team will be collecting comments, pictures and video to constantly upload to Mishka's social sites throughout the event. We are even announcing to the crowd about our efforts to make sure more people interact with us. We have created a hashtag on Twitter for #CYLPhoenix to allow twitterers an easy way to interact with us while they are at the event. All of these things will increase visibility of the event for people who are unable to attend or who hadn't decided yet if they wanted to go.

Since LileStyle is also a video production company, we are bringing our professional video production kit and will be setting up a booth at the event. This video booth is meant to capture in high-quality video all of the attendees experiences and testimonials. We'll also be interviewing bloggers and tweeters to see how they are enjoying the festivities and we'll provide those videos to them so that they can use them in their blogs.

These are just a few great examples that one could use to bring social media to their live events, but not everyone has a dedicated social media team and video production crew in their back pocket. So what about the little guy and smaller events?

Finding one or two volunteers with a smart phone is an excellent way to start. Use the smart phone to upload pictures to your Facebook page and Twitter page throughout your event and encourage others to do the same when you see them with their phone. Make sure that your volunteers are identifiable as a social media support member. T-shirts work great, or just having someone who is personable and likes to talk with people.

Also, make sure that everyone who attends your event knows that you are on Facebook, Twitter and wherever else you are at. Print the information on your brochures, or make sure your event information includes social media sites.

Set up a small table dedicated to your social media presence. Use it to promote yourself by creating a giveaway to anyone who stops by and is already a Facebook friend or Twitter follower. An extra promotional goody can work such as pens, magnets, etc. Make sure its special and unique to only your Facebook and Twitter followers.

Use FourSquare to allow people to "check in" to your special social media table to get a unique goody. 

We'll be posting more articles about live social media support as we draw closer to the big event. You can follow our live social media efforts for Celebrate Your Life on their Facebook page, or follow them on Twitter.