Social Media in Trade Shows: A Beginner’s Guide

A Social Media Marketing Triangle

Social media at trade shows is a very effective marketing tool. If you’re not involved in social media yet, you are likely a small or mid-sized business. Maybe you’ve avoided it because it seemed confusing, cost-prohibitive and time-consuming. The good news is that large corporations  poured money into the research and development of ways to make a profit using social media and how best to use it as a marketing tool. You get the benefit of their experience… and expenditures. There’s a lot to learn from observing the tactics larger companies are using. You can also use the principles they’ve discovered to your own benefit.

Be A Dedicated Tagger

No, put down the spray paint. We’re talking about hashtags. You know, those little pound signs you see everywhere? Those are actually important. Using hashtags effectively in your social media posts can expand the reach of your message, visual branding, and products exponentially. Your brand and products should have a short and memorable hashtag, and you should use them in every post possible. Alongside your own tags, you should also include more popular, better-known tags whenever they actually relate to your post. For example, use the hashtag(s) for whatever trade show you’re posting about. Doing this gives your post a huge boost in distribution because now, anyone who searches for the trade shows tag will be exposed to your post. Hooray, you’ve just gained a lot of exposure with very little effort!

Also tag the brands, products and locations associated with the event in your posts with the actual ‘tag’ option. This acts as a sort of link exchange, as well as means the image posted will appear in the related images of whomever was tagged.

Instagram Is Your Friend

The number of social media in use today is nothing short of mind-boggling. Each has its strengths weaknesses and demographics, but overall, Instagram is the most versatile and useful social medium for marketing. First of all, Instagram gives you enough space to write a post in English: no 140-character cryptograms, here! (Sorry, Twitter.) Next, Instagram is visual-based, which is proven as the most effective means of branding in our tech age. This platform also makes it easy to share a post on another social site or within the same realm.  Organic propagation is a social media jargon term for “posts gain exposure by people sharing them.” Businesses like organic propagation because it’s added exposure they don’t have to pay for. The Instagram feature that allows users to automatically ‘push’ their posts to multiple other social media works so well that most actually use it. That’s a lot of bonus exposure for you when people post about your company or “re-blog” one of your posts!

Easy Ways To Create Post-Worthy Displays

Social media loves a good spectacle, but it really thrives on things that are fun and quirky. Snarky, witty, or philosophical sayings with simple graphics (called “memes”) are always popular. So you don’t have to spend a fortune to create a trade show booth display that people are going to want to photograph and post on social media. Print a fabulous graphic and put it on a banner stand next to your booth. Be sure to include your hashtag! You can also make use of Instagram’s penchant for photo scavenger hunts by placing a series of banner stands around the venue, and having people collect and post pictures of them. Seriously. It may sound like too silly an idea to work, but people do this. All. The. Time.