Social Media Trends For Trade Show Marketing

Just when everyone became comfortable with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, new platform features and emerging networks are changing the social media landscape. Here’s a look at some of the top social trends, and their potential impact on exhibit marketing:

EPHEMERAL CONTENT

Facebook, Instagram & Snapchat stories are all examples of ephemeral content – spontaneous social posts that only last for a period of time. It’s an intimidating form of content creation for businesses, who have mostly always focused on creating well thought out, enduring posts. That’s why Instagram created Story Highlights for Business – a way to permanently archive your Instagram Stories and then curate and feature them at the top of your Instagram profile. This is a great place to showcase your top recent trade show moments, or to give a nod to your best partners and influencers.

FACEBOOK ALGORITHM CHANGES

Facebook made a major change to its News Feed in early 2018, saying it would be showing users more posts from friends and family, and fewer from businesses and publishers. Going forward, trade show marketers will thus have to rely more on promoted posts, ads and influencers to reach their Facebook audiences.

A NEW SOCIAL NETWORK?

The social network Vero has been around since 2015, but it only began seeing explosive adoption in early 2018. Vero competes with Instagram for photo sharing. It offers many features that Instagram doesn’t, including allowing users to share links. Those social links may become an increasingly visible source of inbound traffic to exhibitor websites, similar to the traffic your site gets when you share links to it on Facebook or LinkedIn.

CHATBOTS FOR ALL SIZED BUSINESSES

Chatbots are computer programs designed to simulate talking to a customer service rep or sales rep. Once used only by large companies for fielding simple queries about business hours or return polices, many are now being developed for small business use, such as for handling restaurant reservations or for responding to inquiries received via messenger apps. With more than 80% of customer inquiries or complaints ignored or poorly handled, AI-driven chatbots can help busy exhibitors field questions and escalate hard leads to your sales team.

The evolution of digital marketing presents new challenges and opportunities for the exhibit industry. Adjusting to the changing expectations of your virtual audiences can help you better capitalize on your in-person interactions, as well repurpose you content from live events on your social channels.

By: Matt Bohar – March 27, 2018