From Gen Z to millennials, every generation uses social media. This makes it one of the most crucial channels for marketing anything—trade shows included. 78% of marketers say that social media helps in tracking the spontaneous moments of trade shows. Half of these marketers even agree that it helps bring more people to the booth.
Trade shows have evolved from purely in-person events to involving online and social media attendees. As social media enhances the trade show experience, brands that harness these platforms gain valuable exposure and engagement.
We will share the positive impact of social media on trade shows in this article, from getting more attendees to building strategic partnerships with other businesses. Read on to learn how you can harness its full power to achieve your business goals.
The Positive Impact of Social Media on Trade Shows
Social media provides significant opportunities to enhance trade shows for both brands and attendees.
If you’re an exhibitor:
For your attendees:
Social media has a positive impact on trade shows by expanding reach and engagement for all stakeholders. As exhibitors, you can build buzz leading up to the show, drive qualified traffic to your booth during the show, and maintain connections afterwards.
You can also give your attendees insider access early, enhance their on-site experience via social media interaction, and network with them for continued business well after the trade show is complete.
As we explain more below on how to leverage social media for your upcoming trade shows, you’ll see just how far-reaching the positive impact can be for trade show participants.
Leveraging Social Media at Trade Shows For Success
Smart use of social media can help you maximise trade show ROI across every phase, from the months preceding to long after the trade show has ended.
Here are some strategies on how to use social media effectively to create a buzz around your booth:
1. Promote Your Brand’s Presence
Before the show starts, you can use social media to promote your brand’s presence on the day of the event.
You can use social advertising (for example, Instagram and Facebook ads) and organic posting to showcase your participation and offerings.
For instance, you can share news of the event across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. To ignite curiosity among the attendees, you can offer exclusive discounts or sneak peeks of the products or services you’ll showcase.
A great way to build anticipation is to use contest posts and user-generated content (UGC). For instance, ask your followers to tag others “who need to see our new [product] at [show]!” for a chance to win a prise when they attend your booth.
During the show, post live social coverage of activities at your booth and sessions your team is participating in. Don’t forget to run paid ads and boost your posts at this particular time; it will encourage more traffic and visits to your booth at the show for the remainder of the event.
2. Use The Show’s Hashtag
Create a hashtag for your brand’s presence at the show. Hashtags segment postings on social media and give them more exposure.
Leverage the trade show’s designated hashtag in your posts leading up to and during the event. This will help you be seen in the centralised social conversation and expand your visibility. If there isn’t an official hashtag for the event, create one yourself. Chances are, attendees will be searching for information online using specific keywords, so be sure to leverage them in your posts and stories.
You should also encourage your existing followers to use your hashtag. To make it more exciting, offer an incentive like: “The 5 best posts tagged #BrandNameGetsSocial before noon Friday get a free [small prise] at booth 123.”
Remember to keep monitoring the hashtag you created daily to ensure your posts are showing up and others aren’t flooding the hashtag and hiding your posts. Also, engage with relevant posts from attendees using the hashtag, too.
You can do that by liking, sharing, and reposting user-generated social content on your feed and stories. You gain exposure while they feel special by being engaged with a brand. The more the hashtag gets used, the more visible you become pre-show, during the event, and later on (even as people potentially search for the event for next year, your old posts may show, giving you longer-term exposure).
3. Run Giveaways
Giveaways help you incentivize social engagement and bring traffic to your physical booth. Some prizes that you should consider in your giveaways are:
Before holding giveaways, you should develop clear instructions on how the winner will be selected, so not only is your team aware, but the attendees are also clear on how to win.
For example, a participant should generally be required to take multiple actions that benefit your marketing, like:
Feature some winners in the early days of the show, if it’s a multi-day show, to ignite more interest in proceeding with giveaways. Final tip for giveaways: draw the winners on-site, making the attendees have to visit the booth, which will guarantee booth visits for all who participated.
4. Create Pre-Show Buzz
You should start building anticipation weeks before the trade show date. Here are some recommended strategies:
As the show date approaches, keep posting regularly. You can highlight notable personalities that will be attending your booth or the technology or innovation you’ll be revealing on that day. Additionally, create posts showcasing real-life use cases of your products or services.
Frame all of these as “exclusives” to ignite curiosity and present your offerings as something unique that people can only access if they attend the trade show (generally, that’s how it works with shows, anyway). Offer sneak previews of physical giveaways and posts of your exhibition stand on the social media handles to make it easy for people to find you when they arrive.
5. Go Live
Streaming live video during the trade show helps you accomplish several goals. Firstly, going live is highly engaging when done correctly. You share an insider view of on-site action with remote audiences who could not attend the show but are still interested in what you have to offer.
You can bring the spotlight to important figures, and you could interview booth visitors on air during your live video. Show some special moments, like product launches, or share some insights from the industry.
Display the surrounding areas with spontaneous commentary as you encounter interesting people and moments during your live video; it’ll create more buzz around your stand in general and make people curious enough to check out what’s happening. The idea is to keep it natural and relatable.
For the viewers who couldn’t attend or watch the entire live video, you can post the broadcast as multiple shorter clips spotlighting key highlights. Post these videos across other social posts before, during, and after the show. It’s all good press for your brand.
Going live builds authenticity and accessibility for your page audience, which sees an unfiltered view of the event. They can engage via real-time commenting and viewing numbers to signal a wider interest.
6. Wrap Up Nicely
When the show ends, there’s a way to keep the momentum going with social media. As the trade show finishes, recap your wins, learnings, and the impact your brand made with this event.
Share testimonials from your visitors impressed by your on-site presence. Also, show if you’ve won any awards or gotten coverage from a large media company.
Whether you’ve put signage near your stand or not, it’s a good idea to collect user photos taken at your booth. You can reshare these photos later as a consolidated showcase of visual social proof.
Also, repost these photos and videos to various platforms with thanks and using your branded hashtag (remember, we created it).
Tag partner brands or vendors you collaborated with for cross-content promotion. It will help you widen your reach beyond the show itself.
Lastly, ask your audiences for feedback via polls and Q&As on what resonated with your showcase. This will help you gain valuable insights that you can use to improve your future trade show while keeping your brand top of mind.
Social media really can help you not only with marketing for any live event but also create more brand awareness and give you assets (videos and photos) for long-term marketing.
How To Encourage Attendees to Post About Your Show
Beyond your own social showcase as an exhibitor, encouraging attendees to post further expands your visibility. As you might know, social media is a tough game. With their algorithms changing all of the time, it’s crucial that you take every step from your end to maximise ROI.
You know that encouraging attendees to post will help promote your presence at the trade show and brand awareness in general, so here’s how you should do it for your trade show:
The more content real people organically generate showcasing your brand presence, the better. Your job is to actively engage with and celebrate enthusiasts to keep up the amplification.
Remember, social proof from fellow attendees carries more authenticity than branded posts alone ever could.
Social Media Can Align With Your Business Goals
At the end of the day, leveraging social media at trade shows really helps you achieve certain business goals. You should ensure your efforts align with the actions you take on social media, helping you tie back to the concrete objectives and goals your company defined before the campaign.
Your business should clearly define targets and metrics before investing in trade show promotion. For example, website visitors, content engagement, leads captured, sales won, partnerships created, and so on. Everything should be as per the goals or in the direction of them.
Some strategies that could help you achieve your goals with social media promotion are:
With strategic alignment from pre-show promotion through post-event follow-up, social media can transform passing trade show interest into measurable business growth.
Conclusion: Social Media Can Be Great For Trade Shows
Actively leveraging social media can have a tremendously positive impact on your trade show presence and success. As you implement several pre-show, during, and post-event social strategies discussed, you set your booth to be distinct. It amplifies your brand’s visibility, engagement, and conversions.
Don’t leave these social media platforms to chance. Be thoughtful about promoting your participation and offerings early on to gain audiences. Strategically post through the event itself to drive real-time conversations that translate to booth visits. Thereafter, nurture connections to sustain interest in long-term partnerships or purchases.
Make it easy and rewarding for your attendees to promote you digitally. The more user-generated social buzz, the greater your organic reach. And align your activity firmly with metrics so your efforts directly support your business goals.
When you use social media rigorously throughout every trade show stage, your reach expands exponentially. You drive qualified traffic to your brand, boost your lead generation efforts, and increase your customer retention. What’s not to enjoy about the impact of social media on trade show participation?
