You have promoted and engaged; now it’s time to use social media to reinforce the message and continue the conversation. The conclusion of the webinar does not mean it is time bow out of the social media spotlight. It means that your webinar social media strategy will be divided into two separate, but equally significant, objectives. These objectives are divided by those who attended your webinar and those who did not. For the attendees you will want to continue the conversation. For the non-attendees you will want to share the webinar so that they can get involved in the conversation.
One of the key values of social media is building long term relationships; therefore it is vital for you to stay involved with your established networks after the webinar. During the webinar you clearly articulated your message to the attendees and now you want those attendees to take action. By continuing your social media engagement and reinforcing your message you are keeping the organization on the minds of those attendees. This engagement will help get the attendee to take the action you want them too, such as buy your product.
At this point of the process you are using social media as a way to nurture your webinar attendees. Continue to participate as a member of the community by offering topic related content or asking and answering questions. As with your other marketing efforts, follow up is a key component of your webinar social media strategy. Offer attendees ample opportunities to contact you directly and begin the one on one conversation that can be a crucial step for an attendee to become a customer.
There are several steps you can take to keep the conversation moving forward. First, you can put together a summary of the top discussions that took place during the webinar and post that information to your facebook page, linked in group, or blog. Invite all those who were involved, including both the speaker and attendees, to comment further, clarify points, or pose new questions. You can also take this time to answer any questions that you weren’t able to get to during the webinar. Continue to monitor the twitter feed for more questions or comments and respond as needed.
The second part of the post webinar social media strategy would be reaching out to those non-attendees. These are the people who either registered and didn’t attend or wanted to attend but were unable to make it. Just because someone didn’t attend the webinar, does not mean they are not interested. As we all know, things happen and interested invitees are unable to attend. Post webinar you should reach out to those non-attendees you connected with pre-webinar.
To get these people engaged you can embed the webinar on your social media sites, such as the facebook page, blog, or website. You can use other social media sites, twitter or linked in, to promote and inform your contacts about where it is embedded. By embedded the webinar you are allowing for two positive things. First, and most obviously, you are letting people view it when they have the ability to do so. This is great for those who have a busy or inflexible schedule. Secondly, you are giving your social media connections the ability to share the webinar with their networks. This is truly a great way to spread your message and expand the reach of your webinar.
Also, when embedding in the content you can require people to fill out a registration page in order to view the webinar. This registration page will capture the information about who is viewing it post event. A registration page is a great way to make new connections and (again) expand the reach of your webinar.
By embedding in the webinar you are effectively expanding the webinar’s life span. Encourage both attendees and first time viewers to discuss and ask questions. Again, you will want to foster and nurture the conversation by asking your own questions and responding to others questions or comments. According to Irwine Hispman of Brainshark, a company that specializes in embedding and sharing presentations, “for every person who attends, another person will view the replay.”
In Conclusion…
Social media is a great tool to use as a part of your webinar promotion, production, and post event strategies. It will help you do three things: inform, engage and reinforce. First use social media to connect to potential attendees and then to inform them about your upcoming webinar. Second, use social media during the webinar to keep attendees engaged in the dialogue. Lastly, use social media post event to reinforce the webinar’s message with attendees and to expand the reach of your webinar with non-attendees.
One last tip…
In each part of the strategy make sure your content is easy to share. That is, after all, what social media is all about!