Improve Event Networking for Your Attendees

Event networking can be both enjoyable and perplexing. While people enjoy meeting new people, it can be awkward at times, especially if there is no set venue or time to network. Today's top picks are all about how to improve event networking.

Help your audience mingle by guiding them, maybe through group activities. Smaller sessions also help, which make things more intimate and conducive to interactions.

Facebook Finds a New Event Rival in Pinterest

Facebook has long been known as a major platform for planning and promoting events, but a new challenger now wants in on the action. Pinterest has just launched new tools that allow professionals to plan events on the platform. In the pipeline are more features that allow event marketers to place highly visible ads in users’ search feeds, and to set a “promoted video” that gets more screen real estate than other elements. These all fall in step with Pinterest’s identity as a visual platform.

Get More People in Your Free Events

Free events get a lot of flakers, with a lot of people promising attendance then dropping out at the last minute. Because they don’t “invest” in attending the event, they either easily forget it or never commit at all. But you can always attract more people by offering things that they love. For example, give them something valuable they can take home, whether it’s a simple giveaway or a new set of skills. You can also ask the potential attendees to pay a sort of “attendance deposit”, which will be returned when their attendance has been confirmed. While both these strategies take more work, increasing your audience turnout would be a piece of cake.

Gen Z Marketing Lessons from VidCon

VidCon is in its ninth year, and every important multimedia brand of the current generation has made an appearance. Facebook capitalized on multiple setups that featured photo op booths and a creator-exclusive hangout. MTV had a two-story Cribs-style house, whose kitchen was filled with real cereals and pickle jars amidst bottles of glitter slime. Twitter went for monochrome rooms, with blue, green, and purple rooms that offered different attractions. They also had a place for customized hoodie printing. Of course, YouTube was there with a setup that celebrated its creators and its original programming. There is  huge variety at VidCon, and you can take a cue or two by viewing this slideshow.

Making Event Networking Fun

Events are more fun when people are having a good time, learning and forming new bonds. There are several strategies you can use to promote event networking. For example, you can form an online community about your event. Encourage sharing, as well as personal conversations through activities and pre-allocated “networking stations”. You can also go as high-tech as using people-matching algorithms, or as low-tech as using catchy name badges. You can even sweeten the pot some more by incentivizing networking and interaction!

Up Your Learning and Event Networking Experience at Meetings

Aside from the experience, there are two more major things you expect meeting attendees to take home: knowledge and new opportunities. That’s why it is important to design your meetings for event networking. One way is to make sure the meeting tackles content that is important to the participants. Smaller sessions are better for more focus, and interaction is a must. There should also be a way for the attendees to consolidate their learnings at the end of each session, and to add these learnings into future plans.

Make Your Check-In Process Smoother

The check-in process may be one of the most confusing parts of an event, especially for first-time attendees. Without clear indicators, they won’t know where to go and will surely get lost in the sea of people. This is why it’s important to eliminate all possible check-in pain points, such as long lines at the registration and the lack of guidance about how the whole process will go. Whether you’re using web-based or on-site tech to address these, getting all the tools ready and tested beforehand, is essential. You should also have your team at the ready so they can easily respond to unexpected issues both from the attendees and from your own equipment.

Tackling the Big “Why” of Your Events

With all the things swirling around event creation, it’s easy to lose sight of the goals that propelled you to do the planning in the first place. And the “why” shouldn’t be a simple statement such as “to increase brand awareness” or “to improve business”. Planning an event with purpose is a must. It should be specific and well-researched, and it should also be followed through. This guide advocates a three-step process, starting with what you want the outcome of the event to be. Second, you will be to understand how the attendees would play a role in the whole process. Finally, you should find a way to steer your audience into making your expected outcome a reality.

Can You Earn from Your Event’s Live Video?

Now that the event is a success and you have it on video, how can you open another stream of revenue for it? You can start marketing virtual tickets to those who did not complete the event registration but have been roused by the event’s buzz. You may also use snippets of your video to promote your next event, or to create courses that you could then market separately. Video can be cut and repurposed to suit your other event needs, too! And good news: this works for both massive events and small conferences.

Nailing Referral and VIP programs

The industry hinges not just on that single event that gets all the attendees. It also relies on year-round engagement, loyalty from the community. Referrals are a way of using the following you already have to increase the exposure of your brand even further, while VIP programs are a way to bring in the top level of your audience and show them new and exciting content, with the help of your sponsors. It is important to understand the concept behind these effective techniques so you can use them fully, adding a dimension of engagement that will set you apart from the crowd.

Smarter: Secrets of Work Success

Events, like most other fields, are reliant on set systems that tell you how to work. These systems are not arbitrary: they show us a way of doing things in the most focused, efficient means possible. Thus, it makes sense to adopt these systems to other areas of our professional life as well, in order to help us achieve our goals. Using these systems means dropping all non-essential things and letting the processes work in our lives. To help with this paradigm shift, here are some tips that will help you achieve the “smarter, not harder” mindset that is a secret to success.

Before you tackle audience engagement, you first need to have enough of an audience to engage with. What tips and tricks can you share to improve registration for events?

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