If you’re a B2B marketer, chances are you’ve either attended or hosted a webinar. Although webinars are a great marketing tool – think leads for your sales team – the average webinar isn’t cutting edge or even personal. In a time when everything from print ads to TV shows have hashtags, webinars without a little side conversation leave something to be desired.
But it’s not just about attendee experience – encouraging webinar attendees to talk in a public forum provides additional publicity for your event and valuable insight about what your attendees think about the webinar, the industry and sometimes even your brand. These insights can help you better plan future marketing initiatives.
If you’re looking to make your webinars more social, Twitter is a great place to start. Here are seven tips to consider before your next event:
- Select a unique hashtag to use for your webinar. This hashtag not only creates a forum in which attendees can interact with one another, but it also makes it easy for you to find and monitor those conversations and better gauge success by tracking impressions generated by your event.
- Send a Tweet 15-30 minutes before the webinar as a reminder. Include the link to register and the unique hashtag you’ll be using during the webinar. Doing so reminds attendees to tune in and is an easy way to get in one final promotional push for your webinar before it starts.
- Send a welcome Tweet at the start of the webinar. Includes a note about when the webinar will start, and don’t forget the hashtag! Think of it as a cocktail party – you’re the host, and you should be there to greet your guests at the start of the party.
- Don’t just share the hashtag at the start of the webinar. Keep the hashtag in the footer of slides during the webinar for those who are late to join or who might not have been looking at the screen at the start of the webinar.
- Tweet the Twitter handles of the presenters using the hashtag at the beginning of the webinar so people can find (and use) their handles during the event. You may also want to include the presenters’ Twitter handles on one of your introduction slides. For added promotion, encourage your speakers to Tweet about the webinar leading up to the event using the designated hashtag.
- Stats make great Tweets during webinars. If you want to see your Tweets Retweeted anything with a “%” should be considered. You can Tweet these as they happen, or can pull them ahead of time and issue them as they’re mentioned.
- Remember this is a conversation! Make sure you’re monitoring what people are Tweeting during the webinar, and respond as necessary. Consider responding to people who say they’re joining the webinar or appreciated the webinar using an @mention.
As marketers, we’re no strangers to the second screen. Why would webinars be any different? Adding a unique hashtag and Tweeting about your webinar is one of the easiest ways to make your event more social for attendees, and to gain valuable insights from your audience.
