July 6, 2011 by Jeff Hurt
67% of event organizers do not monitor social media platforms.
37% of conference organizers only post up to three times per week in social media platforms.
76% of German event organizers see social media as an important or very important tool for marketing their events. 81% of English speaking event organizers see social media use as relevant for marketing.
These are just a few of the findings from a new 2011 social media and events study.
Following their successful 2010 study Twitter For Events, amiando, a European online registration and ticketing company, has released Social Media & Events Report 2011: How Is The Events Industry Using Social Networks. Nearly 1,000 English and German speaking event organizers participated in the survey.
amiando wanted to show the relevance of social media to the events industry, understand its future potential, identify common problems and provide tips to event hosts when using social media. The report shows that social media is an important marketing tool for events and will continue to increase in importance.
amiando is offering free downloads of the report in exchange for contact information.
Here are several important findings from the 2011 Social Media And Events Report.
1. The top four most used social media platforms for events are: Facebook (84%), Twitter (61%), Xing (47%) and YouTube (44%).
LinkedIn (35%) and blogs (35%) are underused by event organizers. Organizers should actively find ways to increase the use of both LinkedIn and blogs as social media channels. Remember: don’t just play in the social media platforms where your loyal attendees are. Also play where you can reach new audiences.
2. More than 80% of event hosts (82%) plan to increase their social media use in the future.
3. Increasing awareness (77%) for an event is the top social media goal.
Increasing awareness of their event, program, speakers is the top social media goal of event organizers. Creating a new communication medium (66%), lead generation (59%) and increasing customer loyalty (51%) are also seen as important goals.
4. 66% met their goal of increasing awareness.
45% say they were able to increase customer loyalty. 44% said they met their goal to create a new communication medium. 40% were able to acquire new customers.
5. 54% of event hosts said “lack of time” was their biggest barrier to using social media.
6. Only 37% of event organizers use social media monitoring tools.
Monitoring social media is an important part of any successful strategy. Event organizers should be listening and monitoring first before they ever start sharing.
7. According to 78% of survey participants, Facebook has the highest marketing potential.
Responders see more marketing potential in Facebook (78%) and Twitter (47%) than business networks of LinkedIn (26%) and Xing (38%).
Social Media & Events Report 2011 illustrates that many event organizers already see social media as an important marketing tool. The report also identifies areas that need improvement like social media monitoring and expanding social media use into other platforms like blogs and LinkedIn.
What surprised you most from these finding about event hosts social media use? Why do event organizers see Facebook as having more potential than LinkedIn?
Filed Under: Social Media
What an interesting report – I ordered a copy for myself to see if there were any other findings of interest.
From our experience, people don’t “live” on LinkedIn as much as they do on Twitter and Facebook. Your audience is more likely to see your message on those two platforms than they are on LinkedIn.
This is not to say that LinkedIn shouldn’t be utilized by event organizers to engage attendee communities; but I think that LinkedIn has a huge opportunity to improve their tools and functionality to facilitate better promotion of events.
‘@Kari Interesting thoughts about events and LinkedIn. I think B2B events, trade associations and professional associations may be more in LinkedIn than Twitter & Facebook. I guess it really depends on the audience.
Thanks for reading and providing your thoughts too! Always appreciated.
Interesting! But how to get that to the events, because that’s all real life! Poken’s pretty cool for that (http://www.poken.com) or stuff like spotme
I’m not very fond of asking event managers what they do or do not do, as most of the social numbers I’ve personally researched tell me that someone who says they use Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin/Youtube rationalize ‘having an account’ as using it.
Without a proper understanding of usage and best-practices, I think these numbers are really far off (I’ve read the report and disagree with the base numbers.)
I think that the Facebook and Linkedin question merely revolves around your target audience. Several of our clients are in white collar professions and Linkedin has better adoption there.
‘@Pamela Interesting thoughts about these actions not being productive. In your opinion, what makes something productive online or in social media?
‘@Barry Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts. The report does go into specifics of how many times a week these event managers post on social networks. With that type of additional data, I didn’t see this as too far off base. However, I do agree that we need a better understanding of their usage and practices of social media. Lots to continue to learn and study for sure.
I think the additional data does provide a bit of counter-balance, but from a real-life perspective I think the numbers are unfortunately dis-honest representations.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve asked a training group how often they use Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin and gotten a response of daily or weekly, only to look at the simple truth of accounts going unused for weeks or months at a time.
I’d love to see this report from a empirical standpoint of actually tracking some industry user data from API’s or 1st hand data collection (I’m a numbers guy, so I always want good data!)
‘@Barry I’m with you and would love to see some empirical data about this. Sounds like a great idea for some new research!
I am heading to the American Chamber of Commerce Executives conference in L.A. They have set up a Twitter hash tag at http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23ACCE2011.
That looks like the main social media component.
They have a http://www.facebook.com/pages/American-Chamber-of-Commerce-Executives/206663387367 without much convention activity.
They do have a mobile site created which is forward looking, I think, at http://convention.acce.org/mo/
And a blog at http://convention.acce.org/blog/
All that being said, it looks to me like Twitter is where the community will develop.
‘@Frank Thanks for sharing an example of how one conference is using social media. It’s great for people to see how others are doing it.
Thanks for reading and commenting too. Here’s to your success at all the conferences where you speak!
Appreciate for sharing the article post.
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