3. Integrating Social Media and the Webinar
Social Media is certainly the buzzword of the day and is creating special challenges for companies in their quest for new customers. Should we blog, tweet or both? Should we be on Facebook and Linkedln?
No doubt that most successful companies are testing the waters of social media if not jumping in head first. Survey respondents have committed to social media through the four most obvious venues: Company Blog (59.7%), Twitter (58.0%), Linkedln (51.3%) and Facebook (37.8%). Additionally, 26.9% are involved with Other types of social media. To make the most out of social media, companies must make a serious commitment to the channel, according to Molay.
‘To make social networking a success it requires an ongoing commitment from an organizational level and a continuous plan to expand your reach and effectiveness,” he said.
Bulldog Solutions has jumped in the social media waters with gusto. “We incorporate social media on a few fronts, it’s kind of a 360-degree approach before, during and after a webinar,” said Amy Bills, Director of Field Marketing. “First we use it as a promotional vehicle. We enable all of our employees as well as the speakers and anyone else involved to share the webinar among their networks. That is a pretty powerful
way to get exponential traction.”
Bills continued: “We create messages tailored specifically to share on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedln. This makes it fast and painless for everyone to share, and keeps them on-message. Social media is also a great way to turn the webinar into conversations. We create a Twitter hashtag for the events so people can tweet during the live event. That helps us see what is really resonating with people.”
Post-webinar, Bulldog shares transcripts of the webinar O&A across social media channels. “If social media is about conversation, our feeling is let’s give the community lots to talk about!” Additionally, companies share recordings of the webinar post-event on their networks.
Most survey respondents are on board with the commitment to social media, with 88.3% reporting plans to increase social media interaction in 2011 and of that total, 30.3% plan to increase their social media participation by 11-20%.