Social Wall – The ultimate event engagement booster

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Why is event engagement a massive challenge for the event organisers or the marketers? How do social walls relate to audience engagement at events?

Events have been a crucial tactic to reach the audience, engage with them, and boost brand growth by connecting with the audience in an offline environment.

Whereas, for the audience, the importance of events has been diminishing as they could not derive any value or meaningful experiences from the events due to dull engagement and entertainment opportunities.

To counter the problem of audience engagement, Social Walls has emerged as the perfect solution. But what are these social media walls?

What are social walls?

A Social Wall is a social media feed of user-generated content curated from different (or single) social media platforms into one place and is displayed across any marketing touchpoint.

Caption: Social Wall on the stage of a live event!
Caption: Social Wall on the stage of a live event!

A Social Wall is also known as the social media display, or Twitter wall, Instagram wall or Facebook wall. It includes three following key components:

  • Discovery and curation of all the valuable and relevant content (user-generated, influencer or branded) from social media platforms relating to a hashtag, profile, channel, keyword, etc., into a single social feed.
  • Customisation, moderation and branding of the social feed to make it more exciting and engaging.
  • Displaying the social media live feed on digital screens be it TV, projectors, digital signages, jumbotrons or any other digital screen for the audience.

See how social walls can increase audience engagement at any event – be it a corporate event, seminar, conference or trade show as well as music concerts, wedding, keynotes, exhibitions and many more.

Why are social media walls perfect for events?

Caption: Taggbox social wall for 50 year anniversary event of Heritage Education Funds

Social media walls are perfect for engaging audiences. They present an ecosystem where consumers are already interacting on a daily basis.

There are over 3.5 billion active social media users with an average daily spend time of 2.5 hours. Marketers frequently use social media to engage users and promote brands.

Now from these statistics, it is evident how social media content creates massive user engagement. So, Social Walls brings this engagement to the offline environment, e.g. events.

How do I increase audience engagement with Social Walls?

Here are some of the best ways through which Social Walls can be highly useful in increasing event engagement.

1. Build social proof with users’ valuable content

User-generated content (UGC) is known to be the most engaging, trustworthy, and authentic form of content among audiences. So, curate and display the best UGC around your brand and event using a UGC platform to build social proof.

Displaying positive UGC such as user reviews, customer experiences and stories, product images and videos, you can entice the audience to explore the content of your brand advocates and encourage them to engage with your event or brand.

As well as engagement, Social Walls with UGC display can lead to conversions and sales as over 90% of the consumers say UGC about a brand influences their shopping decisions.

2. Get interactive with your event hashtag

Encourage your event audience to contribute with an extended engagement by creating your unique event hashtag campaign and asking the users to post using that hashtag.

With this hashtag campaign, users can share their ideas, opinions, feedback, questions, and overall experiences of the event and these posts can be displayed on the social media wall for events in real-time.

Getting a chance to feature on the social walls will motivate the users to engage and share their pieces of content. Also, a hashtag campaign will help with user-driven social media marketing along with event engagement.

Caption: Hashtag social wall by consumer technology association for a seminar

3. Enhance event discussions, conversations, & Q&A sessions

Many events have key speakers and discussion forums which require intense audience engagement. But the engagement is lacking as the audience is unaware, hesitant, shy, or even inaccessible due to space or physical presence.

With Social Walls, the audience can engage in these discussions and sessions from anywhere in the event. Also, social media users can be part of these discussions by submitting their insights through a social media wall.

Social media walls act as a platform to enhance the quality of sessions and audience engagement.

Caption: Social Wall at a conference

4. Display the best social content

Social walls can be leveraged to display some amazing and exciting social media content such as stunning imagery and captivating videos,be it influencer content, users’ content or branded content.

This social content will help in attracting the audience to the social walls and they would be interested in exploring such content. By displaying this content on social walls, you will convert the users’ social media engagement into event engagement.

5. Engage audience with entertainment & gamified experiences

Entertainment and gamification are becoming crucial for an offline environment to engage the audience so, similarly, it can be leveraged in the events as well.

Entertainment and gamified experiences with Social Walls includes running in-event photo-sharing content, treasure hunts, rewards-based polls and leader boards, most active participants. This enhances audience engagement.

These rewards, gifts and vouchers as part of gamification attract participation and create a memorable event experience for the audience.

Extended benefits of Social Walls for events

  • Create social media buzz before, during, and after the event.
  • Maximise your audience reach, awareness and exposure by leveraging social media audience for events.
  • Embed this creative social media wall on website to delight your visitors.
  • Deliver exciting, engaging and entertaining event experiences.
  • Create positive word-of-mouth marketing and showcase brand advocacy.
  • Create a loyal social following and build meaningful relationships by establishing connections.
  • Understand audience behaviour; their likings, tastes, opinions and more valuable insights.
  • Generate and maximise sponsorship revenue by showcasing promotional message and banners on the social wall.
  • Build trust, reliability, and conversions along with affirmative brand growth

Taggbox – an event manager’s first choice for Social Walls

To set up an engaging Social Wall for your next event, you can use a UGC platform like Taggbox that can help you create the best possible Social Walls, keeping in mind your event theme and requirements.

With such a UGC platform, you can curate the best and most valuable social content, especially UGC for your event quickly and easily. Further, you can customise the wall with diverse themes, designs and creative elements with this tool and manage UGC rights as well.

These platforms give you the option of content moderation to maintain the utmost quality, get instant content updates in real-time, active customer support, branding and promotion opportunities, easy setup and display, compatibility with different screen sizes and much more.

The tool also provides you with the option of tracking the performance of your Social Wall with its insightful analytics to understand audience behaviour, most active users, sentiments, engagement and much more.

Conclusion

This guide helped you understand the event engagement challenges and how Social Wall can be the best solution to counter this challenge.

Event engagement is a defining metric for evaluating the success and impact of the event. So, it becomes essential that you make the best efforts to gratify the audience with the best engagement opportunities that will benefit both your brand (event) and the audience.

So, with such amazing features accompanied by different pricing and plans, it is an opportunity for you to leverage the Social Wall display tools in your next event to make it engaging and memorable for the audience and maximise your returns on investments.

Molly Hookings
Author: Molly Hookings

Molly joined the editorial team in March 2019. She has several years’ experience working in broadcast and journalism, as well as marketing and PR. Past experience includes working for the BBC and independent publishing houses. If you have a story you think Molly might be interested in, please email: molly@eventindustrynews.com