According to SocialMediaToday.com, a recent survey of 600 small business owners across the US showed that 90% were highly engaged in social media as a core business objective and 74% viewed social networking sites as valuable. Regardless of which channels you use, social and online media networking has significant impact on commerce as a marketing tool.
Most businesses actively using social media channels can attribute more than one quarter of new customers gained to online or social media in 2012. The challenge is to align your choice of active social network channels with your business offerings, business culture and your potential customer’s active use of the same pipeline. With such measurable results, social networking has become a very integral part of tradeshow events and the fast-paced atmosphere of the show floor. People are tweeting, sharing pictures, and checking in on Facebook, which in turn translates to free publicity for you as the exhibitor. Show attendees can and will, in fact, market for you if you can keep them highly engaged.
Attendees arrive with their cell phone in hand, ready to share this experience with their followers and friends. The best way to get them talking is to give them something to talk about. Have a new product? Launching a cool new ad campaign? Offering a service your customer just loves? This is the content they will pass forward to their community of like-minded followers!
The key, however, is how you communicate. Make it easy for people to find you and communicate with and about you. You say you are on Twitter or Facebook, but what is your account name or “handle”? If you want them to mention your company, put your names or handles out there. Add a Quick Response (QR) code with links to your social pages. People may not carry paper and pens anymore, but they certainly have their smart phones loaded with bar code or “QR” code readers. Social media is here to stay. Be sure to incorporate these tools into your next tradeshow event.
Check out the two examples below that we saw at some recent events:
Example A shows that this vendor is on Twitter and Facebook, but gives no details. One would have to search through social media to find them, and if the event is good, no one wants to spend their time doing that!
Example B directs you to many different tools to socialize and share experiences and provides a QR code to make accessing them simple. And if you checked out the social media surrounding the event, you could see how immediately successful it was.
