WHY SOCIAL LISTENING TOOLS CAN MAKE OR BREAK YOUR EVENT

While the event industry has changed over the course of the last three years, social listening tools are still an important technique to use within your brand when it comes to hosting an event. Using any social listening tools can allow your brand to listen in on the conversations surrounding your event. This could make or break your event if any conversations that happen before, during or after the event aren’t positive.

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA LISTENING AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

Social Media Listening and its’ tools are the practice of designing search queries to access data from various social networking sites and then performing a content analysis on this information. The tools then interpret the information to provide guidance to social media marketing operations like when, what and where to post your marketing tactics for your brand.

It allows you to actively listen and engage with conversations across social media platforms about your brand and its products alongside competitors that fall under the same keywords. If your brand does engage in the conversation, then it could boost your social relevance and even build up the trust with whoever is in your audience.

MONITOR YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS

The larger your event might be, the sooner you want to start preparing and monitoring your marketing tactics and listening tools to allow more engagement and brand recognition. Implementing your monitoring process as soon as possible will allow you to have a better outcome of the engagement and conversion you could

Take Carolina Country Music Festival (CCMF) which is held in Myrtle Beach, SC for example. They start their marketing for the festival immediately after the event held the year prior. They create engaging posts to allow users to comment about their favorite memories and moments while at the music festival. They create multiple posts per week to allow them to listen and engage with the fans about the event and get them more excited.

#CCMF2022

Hashtags are one of the best ways to track any and all activity related to your event. Many conversations happen based around a unique and specific hashtag. Festival goers share different things from playlists, videos, pictures, and even more hashtags that will eventually improve the engagement of the festival and the brand. On most platforms, you can click the hashtag to see how many people have participated in the use of it and how many different interactions that there is total when it comes to social listening.

MONITOR AND LISTEN FOR YOUR KEYWORDS

There are a handful of platforms that your brand can use for its social listening. Hootsuite, being one of the platforms, suggests that through the use of social listening tools, your brand will be able to evaluate the type of keywords that users gravitate towards using when describing you. After using this tactic, you will also be able to know what things they might be interested in when at your event based off the words that they use.

Here is a list of the important keywords and topics that Hootsuite thinks you should monitor and listen for right from the start.

WHY IS SOCIAL LISTENING IMPORTANT?

Many think that social listening and social monitoring are one in the same things, but they are not. The two are actually different.

Some things that social listening tools can offer to your brand that are beneficial are:

• Find proactive tactics: Allows you to take initiative and create opportunities instead of waiting for them.
• Identify happy customers: Surprise and delight happy customers by thanking them, giving special offers, or perks.
• Find unhappy customers: Address unsatisfied customers head-on, without being prompted, to direct them to the solutions they seek.
• Pinpoint influencers in your industry: Find social accounts that hold clout within your industry.
• Define trends in your industry: Provide relevant, on-the-nose posts that respond to a trending topic in your industry.
• Take note of potential customers: Chime in when people are looking for suggestions about which products or services are best within your industry.
• Provide customer service: Offer help to customers or remind them that you’re available to help them if they need it.
• Avoid crises: Address potentially brand-threatening crisis situations before they grow into long-term damage control.
• Get a sense of what people think of your brand: Without adding a mention or tagging you in a post directly, people will tend to speak more freely about your brand, allowing you to get an idea of how people perceive your brand. This kind of customer feedback is invaluable.

Whether you decide to use Social Listening Tools for this event or your next event, the outcome is great. It allows you to follow along with potential guests about what they could be most excited for versus what they are hoping to see. Either way, the tools give any brand and even an event planner like me the upper hand when planning events.