On average, 65% of companies worldwide increased their spending on meetings and events in 2023. Research shows that events like trade shows can increase brand recognition by 76%.
💡 Read Social Listening Guide: Proven Hacks, Strategies, and Tools
If you’re thinking about adding live events to your marketing toolbox, make sure you measure the ROI of your efforts. Most marketers use metrics like registration numbers, attendance, attendee engagement, number of leads, conversion rates, and sales.
Those are all great metrics, but you should also look at brand awareness or PR. To measure this, you can implement social listening during your live events.
What is social listening?
Social listening involves monitoring and analyzing social media content that’s related to or relevant to your product or brand. It helps improve customer outreach, product development, etc.
Social media monitoring is the process of tracking and gathering data from social media platforms to stay informed about mentions, keywords, topics, and trends relevant to your brand, industry, or competitors.
Social listening goes beyond monitoring by analyzing the data you collect to understand the broader context and sentiments. It helps you identify trends, gather insights, and inform strategic decisions.
Why use social media monitoring & social listening for live events?
Combining social media monitoring and social listening during live events allows you to gather immediate feedback for real-time engagement. You can track mentions, hashtags, keywords, and other relevant data to understand how your attendees and audience perceive and discuss the event.
That way, you can:
- Generate immediate feedback from attendees to uncover what’s working well and needs adjustment (e.g., If a speaker’s presentation is resonating well, positive mentions will spike).
- Use real-time feedback to take quick actions, like adjusting the volume of a speaker or providing more seating.
- Catch negative feedback early for immediate response, which prevents minor issues from escalating (e.g., If there’s a long line at the entrance, addressing it quickly with an update can mitigate frustration).
- Understand the demographics and interests of your audience based on their social media profiles and activity.
- Monitor for positive, negative, and neutral keywords to gauge sentiment in real time.
- Use insights to plan future events and improve audience engagement strategies.
- Track the level of engagement, such as likes, shares, comments, and retweets.
- Identify high-engagement posts and amplify them by sharing and commenting.
- Analyze the data you collected to understand the event’s impact and success.
- Quickly identify and respond to mentions of your brand or event by attendees.
- Gain insights into what attendees are most excited about or dissatisfied with.
- Spot any viral moments or content that resonate with the audience.
- Identify trends in positive, neutral, and negative sentiment.
- Identify emerging trends or topics attendees discuss.
Below is an example of a social media post attendees shared during a live event, the AAA Trade Show. The Atlanta Apartment Association can monitor mentions and posts related to the event by following the #AAATradeShow hashtag.
How to monitor social media during live events
From setting clear goals to choosing the right tools, a lot goes into social media monitoring during live events. Let’s explore the best strategies.
Know your purpose
What do you want to achieve with your event? This could be to boost brand awareness, increase leads, or drive more sales. Then, you can create more specific goals for your event. Perhaps you want to reach a certain number of ticket sales.
Maybe you want to create a social media campaign in which attendees post selfies of themselves at the event and use a branded hashtag to encourage user-generated content (UGC).
Next, determine who your audience is. If you’re an established brand, you’ve likely already researched your target market and know their needs, motivations, and challenges.
If not, create buyer personas to better understand your audience’s pain points and their preferred solutions.
Once you’ve established your goals and who your target audience is, you can start working out how you plan to meet those goals and reach that audience with your live event.
As long as your goals are measurable, you’ll be able to determine the ROI of your efforts. For example, if you want to boost engagement around your event on social media, you can look at likes, shares, comments, and hashtags your posts or UGC generate.
Set your KPIs
Determine what metrics are most important for your goals. This could include the number of mentions, engagement rate, sentiment score, influencer interactions, or hashtag usage.
Find the right social media monitoring tool
When trying to monitor mentions and social media trends in real-time, it’s best to use a tool that automates the process for you.
A social media monitoring tool offers in-depth analytics and engagement tools. It also monitors the web and social media for mentions of your brand in real-time.
Look for features like:
- All-in-one dashboard for mentions on all channels
- Precise and powerful mention filtering options
- Data analytics and reporting
- Sentiment analysis
- Real-time alerts
Gather data before the event
Monitor social media channels weeks, or even months, before your live event. Your audience might share what they’re most excited to see at the upcoming event or share old memories from previous years.
These conversations offer a great opportunity to engage with your audience and generate buzz around the event.
You can use your media monitoring tool for pre-event mentions to proactively stay on top of trends and gather insights about attendees’ expectations.
Create a content plan
Before you kick off your event, you need a plan for promoting it on social media. While covering the event as it happens is vital for real-time engagement, it’s also important to build anticipation before the event.
Here are some tips for planning social media content for your live event:
- Create teaser posts and LinkedIn videos to announce the event. Use the insights you’ve gathered from media monitoring to highlight aspects that generate excitement among your audience.
- Create a countdown series leading up to the event. Share daily updates, sneak peeks of speakers, session topics, or venue details based on what generates the most engagement from monitoring data.
- Create a hashtag for the event to boost engagement and encourage organic UGC.
- Consider collaborating with media outlets or influencers to expand your reach.
- Launch polls, quizzes, or surveys related to event themes.
Consider real-time event coverage on social
To give those who couldn’t attend a glimpse into your live event, capture key moments with photos or live stream it on your social media platforms. Hiring an event photographer can ensure high-quality images that highlight the best moments of your event.
Share highlights, quotes, and photos from keynote speakers, sessions, and activities. Use your social media monitoring tool to keep track of attendee reactions, sentiments, and feedback during the event,
Track and share UGC, such as attendee photos, videos, and testimonials. Sharing UGC encourages engagement and provides authentic perspectives on the event.
Use different social media platforms to create distinct experiences. For example, X (formerly Twitter) is best for informing attendees, answering questions, and addressing concerns in real-time. Instagram Stories, on the other hand, are great for sharing experiences and inspiring.
You can use Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok’s live streaming capabilities to record your event as it happens and respond to comments by your attendees and audience in real-time. These platforms see incredibly high engagement on live streams.
Monitor sentiment in real-time
Use your media monitoring tool to track mentions of your brand or event on multiple platforms simultaneously.
Set up alerts for event-specific hashtags, speaker names, and relevant topics to capture all key conversations. Use the sentiment analysis feature in your media monitoring tool to gauge attendee satisfaction and identify potential issues early.
You can categorize mentions as positive, neutral, or negative. Some tools offer even further customization, such as the ability to group topic-related mentions under tags for deeper, more categorized insights.
To save time, you can use AI to summarize what everyone is saying about your event on social media and other channels.
Analyze data post-event
After your event is over, don’t just move on to the next one on the calendar. Take a minute to reflect on the previous event to evaluate its success and the effectiveness of your event’s social media campaign.
Gather attendee feedback through surveys, social media polls, or direct messages. Monitor mentions post-event to gauge the event’s lasting impact on attendees.
Apply these insights to refine your event marketing and social media strategy and enhance planning for future events.
Summary
Events are a great way to foster engagement and build a sense of community around your brand and its products or services.
But without social media monitoring, measuring your events’ impact would be difficult. Sure, you can use KPIs like number of registrations, new vs/ returning participants, turnover, or profit.
However, these quantitative metrics measure attendee interest/participation and the financial impact of events, which are surface-level indicators of an event’s success.
Media monitoring offers a more qualitative view of your audience, which provides deeper insights, such as sentiment analysis, audience engagement, and perception of the event in real-time.
That way, you can understand how attendees and the broader audience perceive your event, their sentiments, and the overall online conversation surrounding it.
If you need help getting started with media monitoring, book a free demo with Determ today.
