If you’ve held virtual events before, you likely know that social walls are the new event management trend. They can be an excellent way to increase organic engagement among your attendees, set the tone for your event, and make the entire experience feel larger than life.
But how do you encourage attendees to participate in the social wall? After all, it won’t look that impressive if there isn’t much user-generated content to display.
Generating authentic, energized engagement is an essential piece of the social wall puzzle, which is why in this post, we’ll walk through eight tips for boosting social engagement at your next virtual event.
What Is a Social Wall?
A social wall gathers, filters, and displays content drawn from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. These walls can be shown in many places, from your company homepage to wall-mounted monitors in your office, to feeds displayed at live and virtual events. Usually, event runners use a custom hashtag or keyword to aggregate posts made by attendees, influencers, and the company itself.
A social media wall can help event organizers engage with participants, put attendees in connection with each other, and increase the social media reach of the event’s custom hashtag.
Source – Taggbox
So how do social walls work?
Let’s say you have a virtual event idea for conference. In the event promotional materials, you’ll include a custom hashtag and encourage users to post to social media using the hashtag. Every post made by your organizing team and your sponsored influencers use the hashtag as well.
Then, you’ll use an automated aggregator tool to pull together and filter posts from across various social media channels during the event. The tool will project these selected posts on a single feed for attendees to enjoy.
Why Incorporate a Social Wall for Virtual Events?
Simply put, a social wall is an essential content marketing tool. It creates authentic, positive word-of-mouth marketing from your users.
A social wall naturally creates excitement and community for attendees within your event, as well as generating buzz online and organically extending your reach across your participants’ social networks.
People love to see their own content projected on a big screen, whether it be their photos or opinions. And seeing other attendees’ content gives the impression of engagement, excitement, and community around your event or brand—even if the event is held virtually. Viewers feel like they’re a part of something that others are enjoying, which boosts their enjoyment.
Using a social wall is also very cost-effective; you’re getting user-generated content (UGC) for free—all you need to do is compile the posts into a single feed. After the event is over, you can repurpose the content as a promotional video for your brand or embed the social media wall directly on your website for immediate social proof for future visitors.
8 Tips to Encourage Massive Engagement on Your Next Social Wall
So now you know why a social wall can be so beneficial for your company. But the challenge remains: how do you convince attendees to create the authentic, positive content you’ll want to share on your social wall?
Organic community-building is possible if you get creative and lean into social media’s human element (and the event itself). Follow these tips to garner more participation in your next social wall!
1. Hashtags
First, it’s essential to set a custom hashtag for your event. Your attendees can be posting about the event several times a minute—but if they forget to use your hashtag, the aggregator tool you’re using won’t notice or collect those posts for the social wall.
To avoid this problem, make sure to use a creative and easy-to-remember hashtag. Then, promote it like crazy.
Use the custom event hashtag in all your promotional materials, banners, webpage headers and footers, and on all your branded social posts.
On the day of the event, encourage attendees to use the hashtag whenever they post. And keep using reminders whenever you make announcements throughout the day.
Ensure your audience understands that if they use the hashtag, all of their opinions, experiences, ideas, and feedback will display on the social wall in real-time. Making it clear that they’ll be featured on the social wall if they participate in the shared hashtag will help get them more excited to use it.
2. Questions
Perhaps the easiest way to encourage your attendees to engage with your social media campaign is to ask them questions. Spark conversation about your brand or event (or ideally, both) with questions such as:
- Why are you attending this event?
- What do you hope to get out of this event?
- What’s your favorite memory from past events we’ve held?
- How do you like to use our product?
- Who first got you interested in our product/service?
By asking icebreaker questions like these, you’ll give your attendees ideas for things to post on social media surrounding your event. Often, attendees don’t feel that they have anything interesting or noteworthy to post until you give them a prompt.
Conversely, if your event has a keynote speaker or discussion forum, encourage your audience to send in questions of their own via social media.
In traditional Q&A sessions, many attendees feel hesitant to vocalize their questions or insight. So by letting your event audience use the social wall to submit questions and comments, you’ll encourage more robust audience participation as well as higher engagement with your social wall. It’s a win-win!
3. Prizes and Giveaways
Sometimes, merely asking attendees to post about your event won’t be enough to get them to act. Make sure there’s something in it for them by announcing a giveaway or prize. Hold a virtual raffle, for instance, in which you choose a random profile out of those who have posted about the event using your custom hashtag.
Make the prize something your attendees care about, too; branded pens and stress balls with your company logo probably won’t cut it. Try offering vouchers for popular restaurants or spas, or ask your sponsors to provide prizes from among their products.
4. Polls
Who doesn’t love a good poll?
Stimulate engagement by using a live-voting display. Ask your audience’s opinion on a topic related to your event—or let your attendees vote on something that’s taking place at the event itself.
For instance, some gaming events let audiences watch teams compete on a live screen and then vote on which team they think is doing the best using their social media profiles. The social media wall then displays the voting results.
This kind of interactive audience participation can create a sense of competitive fun that’s sure to spark interest in your social wall.
5. Games
Speaking of competition, don’t be afraid to gamify the experience! Your social wall content isn’t limited to straightforward feedback, questions, or documentation of attendees’ opinions. Try creative competitions like the following:
- Start a contest for which attendee can share the best event-related photo or joke
- Create a leaderboard for the most active participants
- Hold a meme contest
- Design a (virtual or real-life) scavenger hunt
Announce that you’ll be offering prizes for the winners, and you’ll be surprised at how many attendees join in the fun!
6. Videos
If you have a speaker or your event contains presentations, display those videos on your social wall!
Let your audience interact with and respond to live streams and video clips of significant moments from your day. Event organizers can also upload periodic video announcements of industry-specific news and upcoming segments within the event.
You can also encourage your audience to send in videos of themselves, either responding to prompts, aligning with a specific theme, or as a testimonial to your event.
7. Feedback
Ask your audience for feedback on what the event is doing well and what could be improved.
Most social wall aggregators have settings that allow you to filter out harmful or unwanted content, so you can share only the most constructive feedback curated as you see fit. However, inviting input from attendees on what they approve of or what they’d improve will make them feel welcomed (and often eager) to share their opinions.
8. Connections
Encourage online communities by letting your attendees build and showcase their connections using the social wall. Tag attendees in your branded posts, stimulate conversations and encourage participants to give shout-outs to each other.
While you’re at it, use your social wall to invite attendees to sign up for your company’s newsletter. Don’t miss this natural opportunity to build a community around your brand and grow your email list simultaneously.
Lean into the community-building aspect of the shared social wall, which will help your audience feel more included and inclined to engage.
Final Thoughts
User-generated content can quickly expand your brand’s reach and give you free, authentic social proof you can use in promotional materials long after your event is over. An engaging social media wall will help level up your next event—but only if you can stimulate enough audience engagement to make it feel organic and energized.
The key to building engagement with your social wall is to be creative and lean into your event’s human, community-building aspects.
Don’t be afraid to think outside of the box, ask questions, play games, and get competitive. Experiment to find out what works for your audience—and don’t forget, audiences can sense when the event creators genuinely believe in and care about what they’re doing. Let your excitement about the event shine through!
Author Bio
Jo Barnes is the founder of Your Lifestyle Business, a blog dedicated to empowering solopreneurs to build a business they can run from anywhere in the world. As a globe-trotting lifestyle entrepreneur Jo has explored 30+ countries in the last 10 years while building 6 & 7 figure online businesses and is currently locked down in Thailand. 😎🏝
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