Twitter 101: Trade Show Success Stories

August 26, 2010 | by Amy WIlson

Over the past couple of weeks we've shared ways to harness the power of Twitter to increase buzz about your show and increase attendance at your exhibitors' booths.

Our Previous Twitter Articles

As our Twitter series draws to a close, I'd like to leave you with some inspiring examples of other companies and event managers who have successfully used Twitter in their show promotion.

MTV 2010 Movie Awards

This June, MTV used a live Twitter Tracker to keep a real-time list of all the tweets about the 2010 Movie Awards. They encouraged the award show attendees, as well as their home audience, to tweet their thoughts, reactions and questions to the event proceedings as they unfolded. And, since MTV was using a Twitter Tracker, they could respond quickly and easily to any questions that were tweeted in. They generated so much buzz about their event that tweets with "#MTV" hit over 400 per minute that night.

ESAB North America

ESAB successfully made social media a part of their marketing strategy for their booth at the 2009 FABTECH International & AWS Welding Show. They introduced their Twitter account in conjunction with a Facebook fan page. To generate buzz, they began tweeting a week before the event about product previews and giveaways at the show.

During the show, they tweeted about product demos and gave branded dog tags to all demo attendees. Later on, they sent spotters around the show floor to reward any dog tag wearers with ESAB-branded products. Their product demos and presentations reached over 1000 visitors at the show, and even more visitors online via ESAB's Twitter feed.

Exhibitor's 2010 Social Media in Marketing Survey

If those two anecdotes aren't enough to convince you of everything Twitter can do for your show, listen to these quotes from show managers' responses to Exhibitor Magazine's latest survey:

"It took us less than two months to generate over 65 followers via Twitter. That allowed us to directly interface with key local and trade industry media. This has increased our overall public relations efforts by 10 percent."

"We filled seats at a sponsored event by using social media. Our direct-mail efforts cost money and filled three seats. Social media cost nothing and filled the remaining 17."

"Using social media, we increased attendance at our regional meetings by 50 percent over prior years, and did so at about 50 percent of the cost."

In summary, Twitter can be a productive marketing tool if you use it well. While it's true that learning to use this particular social medium might take some time, that time will be well spent. Using Twitter can increase media coverage and attendance of your event, all of which will please your exhibitors and sponsors and make them more likely to return to your show next year.

If you have questions or stories about your own Twitter experience, please share them in a comment.

So What's Up Next?

Now that our first Twitter blog series has come to an end, we want to hear from you! What do you want to learn about? What technologies do you need to understand to better run or market your shows? How can we better help you? Go to our contact page here to tell us what you want and how you want it done!

Our next series is going to be all about Facebook and how to use it for your shows and your businesses. Thank you all so much for your business. It lets us keep sending this great information out to you. Talk to you all soon!

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