Events • Social Media • Tech

Social Media Walls and Buzz Centers for Your Events

by Catherine Reed
7 years ago
4 min read
Written by Catherine Reed
Buffer

As an event professional, you know how crucial it is to keep your attendees engaged, especially between sessions and speakers. Additionally, you want to make sure your sponsors and trade show vendors get the attention they deserve.

Luckily, one solution can help you do both while simultaneously creating a “techie” atmosphere and effectively promoting your event. What’s the magic answer? Using social media walls and to build buzz centers in your space.

What’s a Social Media Wall?

A social media wall is a centralized display that displays social media posts related to the event. Typically, they focus on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, as these systems allow striking visuals and quick comments.

The system is programmed based on specific search parameters, allowing it to display the most relevant posts. The easiest way to accomplish this is to create a hashtag for your event and encourage everyone to use it when posting about the conference.

You can use anything from a large television (or wall of TVs) to a projection screen to display the information on a large-scale. This creates a dynamic visual that draws attention to the buzz center, generating excitement and giving attendees something to enjoy.

Benefits for Attendees

Social media walls do more than just give attendees something to watch. Since anyone can use a hashtag to share their posts, it also encourages a higher level of participation, keeping them actively engaged. It also serves as a conversation center, letting people gain access to insights about activities they may be missing or giving people something to discuss while networking.

It’s also fun! Most people love seeing their comments and photos displayed on the big screen. In fact, some people are so enamored by their post being included that they’ll snap a picture of the post crossing the screen and add it to their social media account just so they can see it presented too.

A social media wall is also a great way to drive traffic to specific activities within the event, letting you point out areas of interest to attendees and encouraging them to head on over. You can also send out schedule reminders, helping everyone stay on track.

Benefits for Businesses

Displaying these feeds is also an excellent way to bring additional attention to your sponsors. You can add branded posts that feature the hashtag, ensuring the sponsor’s message is regularly displayed in the stream. Plus, people who search for the hashtag through the social media apps on their devices will see the sponsor-related posts too, increasing their total amount of exposure.

You can also use posts from attendees to gather feedback. Most eventgoers will share their experiences organically over social media, letting you see information about the good and bad experiences they may be having. Often, this is more efficient than asking attendees to complete surveys, which usually interrupt the event experience and may even be viewed as a nuisance. And, since feedback is received in near real-time, you can intervene quickly should a problem be noted.

As a bonus, you’ll also get a steady stream of user-generated content that you can use in various marketing materials in the future. For example, you can select the most intriguing images and use them as the focus of a blog post, showing everyone the most exciting moments of the event. You can then post a link to the article with the hashtag, and increase its exposure even further.

A social media wall doesn’t require a significant amount of floor space and can be created in almost any size, so they are fairly easy to integrate into virtually any event, allowing you to create a buzz center where attendees can share their experience, gather essential information, and simply have fun all while promoting your sponsors and gathering some important data for yourself.

If you are ready to harness the power of social media to help improve engagement and generate buzz, then a social media wall and buzz center might be the right choice for you.

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Catherine Reed

Catherine is a content creator, article writer, and web copy specialist who has translated her professional and educational experience into a full-time writing career spanning categories as diverse as technology, education, finance, and staffing. She holds a Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology and has nine years of experience working specifically in the mobile device field.
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