15-step social media marketing plan to help you promote your next genealogy conference

When we organize a genealogy conference, we want record-breaking attendance, lots of good learning opportunities, happy, successful vendors, attendees who want to attend the next conference, and non-attendees who plan to go to the next one.

If your society is in the midst of organizing a conference for next year, your marketing team should consider following Hootsuite’s social media plan to promote the event – before, during, and after.

This list of 15 zero-cost initiatives from social media platform innovator Hootsuite can help your society leverage the benefits of social media to generate excitement about your next conference.

Here are the highlights of Hootsuite’s social media plan (with a couple of ideas from a friend and me).

Before the event
1. Think of one unique, short, memorable branded hashtag. (If I may jump in here with my own suggestion. Use the same hashtag for everything you do, whether it is a conference or about member benefits. Whatever you do, do not add the year to your hashtag that you must change every year. In other words, use #ABC, not #ABCConference2015.)

2. Make a social media promotion plan – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram.
Highlight speakers to generate excitement about the conference. (If I may interject again. Include your marketplace vendors in your social media plan.)

3. Promote social media content offline. Include the official event hashtag in any posters, invitations, flyers, or tickets.

4. Schedule tweets for the day of the event. (Me again. You can schedule tweets? Yep. There are many tools available to do this. Hootsuite and Buffer are often people’s top choices and both offer a free version.)

5. Use targeted ads. (This is probably the only idea that may require some money, but think creatively. Perhaps there is another way to create ads and post them elsewhere.)

6. Social media campaigns for ticket giveaways.

7. (This one comes from my Facebook friend, genealogist and social media guru Jen Baldwin.) Ask each speaker to include in their handout/syllabus four or five points that could be tweeted. Perhaps write, “Tweetable points or variations,” before the suggested tweets. Jen wrote on Facebook, “If an electronic syllabus is available, add a “tweet this” button to the text.” Remember to encourage your speakers to tweet key points as well.

During the event
1. Monitor and engage with attendees on social media.

2. Organize on-site promotional campaigns. These can include a scavenger hunt or “photobooth” in front of an event poster.

3. Display social media messaging at the venue.

4. (This one is my suggestion.) Encourage your vendors to tweet. If they do not tweet, ask them before the conference to provide one or two lines that you can tweet on their behalf.

After the event
1. Tell a story with social media.

2. Ask attendees to rate your performance.

3. Analyze your own social media performance.

4. (Here’s another one from me.) Tweet four or five highlights during the week following the event. These tweets could include attendance numbers, quotable quotes from attendees or feedback forms, speakers’ take-away lessons, newly discovered website, and a list of the vendors.

Sound like too much work? Divvy up the task. Put one committee member in charge of contacting the vendors, another one to help the speakers add tweets to their handout, and put three or four people in charge of tweeting during the conference. Assemble several people during the planning stage to brainstorm tweets.

Read the details of Hootsuite’s plan in Social Media Marketing Strategy: Before, During, and After.

Did we leave anything out?