Are you making the most of social media?

A new report by Aventri and Little Bird Told Media is aiming to provide insight into how the events industry makes use of social media. Among the key findings was the fact that 96% of survey respondents said they used social media for marketing, but only 38% said they used it for crisis management. 87% used it for customer engagement, 77% for news, 65% for live streaming/video, and 42% for gamification/contests. The report found that Facebook was the preferred social media platform, used by 90% of respondents. After it came Twitter at 71%, Instagram at 66%, YouTube at 33% and Snapchat at 15%. Four out of five respondents said they used event-specific hashtags, while nearly half said they made use of secondary event-specific hashtags. However, the report also found that 15% of respondents do not actively promote the use of social media channels at their events. It suggests that the industry still has room to grow in terms of how it harnesses social media channels. It also found that 42% of respondents leave all their social media coverage to one dedicated person, which leaves little room for error and no backup plan. Furthermore, it found that ‘vanity metrics’ such as likes, reactions, and comments were the preferred way to measure the success of social media for event professionals. These metrics, however, do not always bear a direct correlation with numbers that speak to business success.