The meetings and events industry is booming, with the number of hosted events increasing year after year. In fact, our recent Global Planner Sourcing Report shows that both event budgets and attendee numbers are growing – putting more pressure on event planners to deliver memorable, exciting, and impactful attendee experiences that drive ROI and increase attendee engagement.
This added pressure, along with the fact that event planning is one of the most stressful jobs out there, can wreak havoc on one’s psyche. But, you’re not alone – you have your attendees!
Who better to help you deliver a more impactful event than those who have already registered? After all, they are likely some of your biggest fans, so giving them the tools they need to more easily showcase your event and your company to their broad social media networks can help you deliver bigger and better results.
But, just how do you give them those tools? With a Social Media Ambassador Program! Now, you’re probably thinking, “Oh no, another project?” Not quite, as launching such a program doesn’t mean adding a lot to your (already very long) task list. The key is to start small and build up from there.
We launched an incredibly successful program for this year’s Cvent CONNECT in Las Vegas using only our two-person team! Here’s the inside scoop on how we did it.
Email Communication
When registering for Cvent CONNECT, we included a checkbox for attendees to mark if they would be interested in joining the program. Using this initial attendee list, we created an email campaign that we launched a few weeks before the start of the event that included weekly social media challenges, key conference announcements, and other helpful (and fun) information to build momentum leading up to the event.
During Cvent CONNECT, we continued the communication, delivering daily social media challenges via email and through push notifications within our mobile event app.
Don’t have a team to help you launch a full-fledged email campaign? No problem! You can easily create an email template of your own and schedule emails within Outlook, Gmail, or even within the Cvent email marketing tool!
Event Website
To increase awareness, we also created a page on our event website with information about this year’s program which highlighted program expectations, FAQs, and more. This page also featured a link to a form where attendees could indicate their interest if they had not done so during their registration process.
Fun fact: We built this landing page within Cvent Flex and it was super easy! We built an additional landing page for all attendees (i.e. even for those who weren’t part of our Social Media Ambassador Program) to offer even more ways for our attendees to share the #CventCONNECT excitement to their networks. To drive more traffic, we promoted these pages on our Cvent social media channels for 2-3 weeks before the event start date, further encouraging attendees to get even more “CONNECT-ed” and join the program.
Social Graphics
We created a variety of social media graphics to make both our attendees’ and our social media posts more visually appealing including:
- I’m a Social Media Ambassador: Inspired our ambassadors to share their participation in the program.
- Top Takeaways: Encouraged attendees to share their daily conference highlights.
- I’m Attending and Get Social: Graphics for all attendees to share!
Need a DIY option to create social media graphics? We are big fans of the (free) solution Canva.
Mobile Event App
Since we drink our own champagne at Cvent, we leveraged our CrowdCompass mobile event app to send our ambassadors unique push notifications with even more fun social challenges before, during, and after the event.
We also made sure that our event hashtags and social media handles were easy to access within the Social Media section of the app.
Results
In just its second year, we grew our Social Media Ambassador program by more than 300%. We had highly engaged attendees posting, tweeting, and sharing their unique Cvent CONNECT experiences to their social networks – increasing our social media reach and impact exponentially. On Twitter alone, attendees generated thousands of tweets reaching more than 5.5M people. Moreover, both of our event hashtags, #CventCONNECT and #TogetherNow, were trending topics on Twitter!
This year’s Cvent CONNECT left no shortage of tweet-worthy or Instagram story-sharing moments and we were so fortunate to have an incredible group of Cvent customers who preached the Cvent CONNECT gospel on social media before, during, and after the main event!
Meet the Top Cvent CONNECT 2019 Social Media Ambassadors
Based on their terrific content and engagement throughout the event, we named one attendee our Most Engaging Social Media Ambassador of 2019 and also recognized 5 honorable mentions, who, as it turns out, are also all current Cvent Celebrities! From Twitter to Facebook, and LinkedIn to Instagram, these top-performing social media ambassadors made a huge impact, helping us to further spread the Cvent CONNECT excitement to millions of others.
Now, without further ado, meet the awesome Cvent customers behind this year’s program and check out some of our favorite posts from them!
Grand Prize: Brenda Ainsburg
Top 5 Honorable Mentions
Lindsay Buchanan
LaDonna Henderson
Leah Moon
Thu Nguyen
Emily Thompson
Preregister for Cvent CONNECT 2020
Want to participate in our social media ambassador program at next year’s Cvent CONNECT? Be sure to mark your interest when registering! Pre-registration for our 2020 event in Las Vegas is open now – so you’ll be the first to hear when registration is live! Planning to attend Cvent CONNECT Europe in October? Follow us on Twitter @CventCONNECT for details on how to become an ambassador for the October event.
We hope you’ve found these tips on how to kick start your own Social Media Ambassador Program helpful! When you put some thought behind why and how you are engaging your most enthusiastic customers, you can really pull together one savvy and influential group to promote your event.
