Event monitoring: the importance of social media for your event

Spotler Engage • 5 minute read • 11/07/2019
Media monitoring
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The festival season has begun! In the summer, millions of people visit a (music)festival or event, and social media play an important part in the organisation of these events. Visitors share photos of their presence, ask questions online and ‘go live’ to share the experience with their friends. Social media channels make it easier to spread the word about the event and help you to lead the event in the right direction, before, during and after it takes place. Hence, there are more than enough reasons for an organiser to think about event monitoring. In this blog we give you five practical tips to get you started! 

1. Using media monitoring for important news

When you organise an event, your focus is on setting everything up, getting the necessary permits, and ensuring the safety of your visitors. But where does social media fit in? After all, these are the channels that inform and inspire many of your visitors. In the build-up to the event, social media should already be part of your plan of action. After all, hundreds or even thousands of visitors are going to visit your event! Social media can also help you identify potential problems and questions before the event takes place, which allows you to adjust your communications. For example, does the same question keep coming up? Then you could decide to send an extra message to your visitors, for example via email or the event page on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

In this example, the organisers of the Coachella festival let interested people know their ticket sale has begun!

And Tomorrowland’s organisation is sharing their line-up via Twitter:

2. Showtime! Show how awesome your festival is

This is it. You spent months preparing for this moment and the day is finally here. After a few finishing touches, you are ready to go. Hello visitors!

Create searches to monitor your event. This also allows you to play into current events. Of course, this depends on the content of the event you are monitoring.. For a festival, you are likely to think about topics like the weather, timetable, artists, campsites, parking spots and possible escalations.

The Glastonburry Festival organisation is warning visitors for the heat and advises to stay hydrated:

During the event, you should keep an eye on the peaks in these searches, so you can act if needed. For example, run a narrowcasting in real time, so you can keep track on what is happening, like in this example from Pinkpop:

narrowcasting - pinkpop

3. Let those at home share in the joy with a livestream

The latest developments in the field of social media make it possible to show what is happening during your event live on the internet. Instagram Stories and Snapchat are popular, but also Facebook live is often used during events. Moreover, Youtube video can be used as a livestream event also.

The European Song Contest was, of course, broadcast live on television, but it could also be watched on several social media channels, as this video shows. Naturally, other platforms like Instagram (Stories) and Snapchat are also good media to use during an event. Choose your channels in advance and clearly refer to these platforms.

4. Use both reactive and proactive webcare

Webcare has become commonplace and also during events people find their way to social media with (practical) questions and complaints. Not responding to these messages is simply not an option anymore. So, always respond to the messages that are directed to you and help your visitors on their way.

The Dutch Red Cross even goes a step further. By monitoring the right words, they can proactively offer online help during the Dutch Nijmeegse Vierdaagse, both to participants and first-aid helpers.

5. Analyse your event: celebrate successes and learn from your mistakes

After the event has taken place, visitors enjoy looking back via social media. Of course, they want to see that legendary concert of their favourite artist once (or perhaps a hundred) times more. So share those awesome aftermovies and pictures!

Did you organise a business event? Then share the most important keynotes of guest speakers; your attendees will definitely appreciate it.

Dissatisfied visitors will take to social media to voice their feedback, too. Take all feedback seriously, and use it as motivation to do an even better job next year.

Media monitoring allows you to make an analysis of your own event by creating an activity report. What did visitors talk about during your event? How many messages were sent to the organisation? How many compliments and complaints came in? If you organise an event more often, you can compare the results of previous years, as in the following volume chart about the Dutch musicfestival Pinkpop:

brandmonitor_volume_chart

Analyses give you the possibility to measure points of improvement and successes, so you can use this information to create an even better event. Are you organising an event and would you like to know more about all that monitoring has to offer? Then just contact us!

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Spotler Engage
At Spotler Engage, we have a genuine passion for customer contact, media monitoring and reputation management. We continuously feed ourselves with new knowledge about groundbreaking technologies in these industries. And of course, we love to share this knowledge! Dive into our whitepapers, ebooks, blogs, industry reports and success stories. Are you already hanging on our every word? Hopefully we can share our enthusiasm with you and start a conversation!

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