Social media has become a core component in various marketing platforms and types. As a strategy, it has become a way of helping businesses engage with customers to help boost sales and achieve continuous success.
If you run webinars to promote your products and services, social media marketing is among the best strategies you can implement within your presentations. Thanks to the innovative webcasting platforms of today, you can integrate social media tools that are easy for your viewers to use so they can share content to their own social networks.
So how do you do it?
Here are a few ways you can apply in order to utilise the potential of social media marketing for webinars:
(1) Provide viewers with social media tools for sharing content within your webinar platform
All social media networks are capable of sharing links or URL to your webinar’s page. Others like Facebook and LinkedIn allow you to add short descriptions or an excerpt above 140 characters of your webinar.
Tools such as Share This, ShareAHolic, and other similar SMM tools can be integrated as widgets. It is easy for your to implement and easy for your audience to use.
Sharing of URL and short relevant messaging is done passively by your audience. All you need to do is provide them with useful content to compel them to share it to their own networks.
(2) Promote webinars through your social media channels
Even if you have registrants who’ve already secured their spots on your up-coming webinar, it’s better to spread the word to your social media connections as well. Remember that it’s rare to have a 100% attendance on webinars, so there’s always room for more viewers.
(3) Spark conversations before and after your live webinars to raise interest and to get non-attendees to attend (for on-demand webcasts)
Getting more attendees is possible with social media because you get to engage with your followers who can potentially turn into registered attendees. According to Brainshark’s white paper, 49% of attendees review a live webinar’s content after viewing it; and 34% of those attendees may forward available on-demand content to their contacts.
If you’ve managed to get attendees via your webinar registration page, the additional viewers you can get through social media networks can increase your viewership. You can post on timelines and Tweet about your on-demand webcasts to drive viewers to your registration page while the content of your webinars are still fresh and relevant.
(4) Monitor the response and comments on your social networks (for analysis and improvement)
Apart from getting responses via polls, Q&A, and surveys, you can monitor responses (likes, shares, Tweets, etc.) on your social networks to see which works better than the other. By doing so, you’ll be able to determine which network is more responsive and engaging, and which one is truly valuable in terms of delivering additional viewers to your webinars based on their actions.
A webinar’s success is not just having having people coming in via registration and keeping them until the end of the presentation. You can leverage the value that social media can bring before, during, and after a webinar presentation since you can always share on-demand webinars (via link, Tweet, timeline post, etc.) to your followers, so you can get more viewers and sharers from these networks.