The OpenWater Blog

3 Simple Ways to Incorporate Social Media in Your Events

You can encourage social media use at your next abstracts conference all day long, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that attendees will use it. After all, if it’s optional, those who believe that it’s too much effort will opt to stay silent rather than post, even if they have good things to say or photos to share.

Luckily, there’s a way around this: Actually incorporating social media into your event in a way that incentivizes attendees to use it. Of course, this doesn’t mean incorporating it in less-than-meaningful ways just to get attendees to post. Rather, you should encourage attendees to post by offering prizes or other incentives for their participation.

Below, we’ll go over three of our favorite ideas you can use to incorporate social media in your next abstracts conference.

1. Create a Networking Photo Challenge

One of the greatest challenges at any abstracts conference is attendee engagement with each other. Because most people are shy or are consumed by their phones or other work, they don’t take the time to get to know other attendees. But, as you know, attendee engagement is of the leading benefits of conference attendance.

Creating a photo challenge where attendees must take a photo with someone they just met or someone who shares a particular interest or fact (i.e. same birthday month, etc.) is a simple way to generate social media content while still relating back to a conference benefit.

2. Create Photo Backdrops With Incentives

Have you ever seen photos from conferences where attendees have the same background and different props or other accessories as part of the picture? This isn’t a coincidence; it’s another social integration technique that really works!

By creating fun photo stations throughout your event, you’ll better incorporate social media in the event and make it natural for attendees to take and share pictures. You may even incentivize the best photo with a prize to get more people involved.

3. Create Interactive Polls

You’re already going to survey attendees after your event to see what they thought. But, what if you could receive attendee feedback during the event while encouraging social media use in the process? With interactive polling, you can.

Interactive polling is a non-traditional social technique that will get attendees more excited than just raising their hands. More importantly, you can use these polls to gauge the success of your conference before it’s over. This may also allow you to make adjustments as needed for greater attendee satisfaction rather than learning of potential shortcomings only after the conference is over.

How Will You Incorporate Social Media in Your Events?

There are countless ways to incorporate social media in your events and the ideas here are just three potential suggestions for your next conference.

The most important detail to remember is that you must incorporate social media and do so in a way that makes the most sense for your attendees. With that in mind, you’ll have a successful abstracts conference, guaranteed.

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