Incorporating Social Media for Your Webinar Campaign

If you’re hosting your first webinar on Xtalks.com, our team will take you through your first in-depth webinar marketing and production schedule. We take care of everything you’ll need for a successful campaign — all you need to do is present your content. But if your team has the bandwidth to work in concert with Xtalks’ marketing team, you might be asking, how can I optimize my social media channels to attract my target audience so they register for my recorded or live webinar?

Using social media to market your upcoming webinar is easy, but do you know how to use this tool to its full potential? Continue reading this webinar production tips and marketing blog post as we will be sharing why and how you should market your webinar on social media networks.

Why You Should Be Putting in Effort on Social Media

Globally, the number of digital device users is still expanding. The Global Digital Report 2019 shares some key statistics on the continued growth and popularity of social media, including:

• Global internet users have increased by 8 percent annually, with 4.333 billion users in 2019
• Global social media users also increased by 8 percent annually, with 3.534 billion users in 2019

With almost half of the population being active on social media, plenty of companies are having great success in expanding their follower base, which eventually leads to greater conversion. While B2C companies definitely lead the space, more and more B2B companies are getting heavily engaged on social media. You do not want to miss the chance to reach your target audience through these free channels. However, how exactly do you connect to your audiences in an engaging way? It’s important to establish your social media marketing strategy early on to get the most out of these platforms.

Set Social Media Goals

Your first step will be to determine your social media goals to create an effective strategy. Setting goals will also help you understand how to measure your success and improve your metrics.

To help you figure out your social media goals, think of the reason you decided to host a webinar. Did you host a webinar to increase brand awareness? Are you aiming to create a relationship with a target audience to convert them to clients? Or are you trying to share and educate the industry on your latest product launch? By remembering the purpose of your webinar, we can convert that aim to a social media goal — to attract your target audience to your initiative and get them to join your webinar. Your next step will be to find the best platforms to focus on and to create engaging social media content that aligns with your purpose and goals.

Research Your Audience and Choose the Most Appropriate Social Media Platforms

Have you conducted market research to determine who is most engaged with your product or service? Be sure to dig into your research and don’t make assumptions about your target audience’s preferences.

Here are some common demographic factors to help you to determine your most engaged audience.

• Age
• Gender
• Occupation
• Language
• Location

Depending on your product or service, age and gender are factors that may help you to determine which social media platforms you should focus on. As your webinar is addressing industry-specific topics, occupation becomes a key factor in finding your potential audience, so platforms like Linkedin or XING may be good starting points.

Since your live webinar is scheduled with an exact time and date, you will have to consider language and location so that your audiences can comprehend the content and understand when to join your webinar in their own time zone. If you’re targeting a specific location, you can also determine a posting schedule to optimize your reach (be sure to read more on scheduling below).

While it may seem obvious to use every social media platform available, you’ll quickly find that preparing content and interacting with followers takes a considerable amount of time and effort if done optimally. With a limited amount of time and resources available, you’ll want to focus your efforts on the most relevant platforms.

The graph below will help you in determining the most popular social networks, which is a good place to start.

The table here details the use of different online platforms by demographic groups, which will assist you to choose the online platforms to use after you pinpoint the demographic factors of your target audience.

You might find that more than one platform is matching your target audience’s preferences and decide to use multiple social networks to market your webinar. Operating multiple social media platforms is perfectly doable, but if you’re just starting out, it may be best to focus your effort on a primary platform to start with and expand once you’re able to do so. Also, keep in mind that the strengths of various online channels are different, so you will have to curate your posts to fit with the online culture.

Create and Curate Engaging Content

Every post, reply, like and comment should serve a purpose when you are creating your content. Having a consistent schedule of your posting time and frequency will help you to effectively tackle your goals. Consistency helps your followers understand what to expect from your account.

For example, a good practice is to start your social media posts a month before your webinar date, with at least one post about the webinar per week to remind and engage your audience.

With that said, making a social media content calendar is the best way to organize your plan by scheduling the caption, image, video, and hashtags at the optimal time and date across all your networks.

Depending on your needs, there are abundant social media scheduling tools out there, such as Buffer and Later, to provide you an easy way to organize all of your social media accounts and assist you with quick and easy content creation.

Analyze Your Results and Improve

Once your posts are generated on a consistent basis, it is time to identify your best and worst performing social media practices. While some scheduling tools and platforms will give you access to the analytics of your posts, analytical tools like Google Analytics will allow you to study your metrics so you can adjust and improve your practices. If your post provides links, remember to use UTM parameters to track the performance. Similar to our previous marketing blog on A/B testing webinar titles, you will want to conduct A/B testing on your social media posts too. Here are some ideas of the types of A/B testing you can do:

• The optimal time to reach your followers
• The length, tone and personality of your content to engage your followers
• The placement and number of hashtags to increase your exposure

What We Do to Help You

If you don’t have a dedicated social media marketing team or wish to work jointly with Xtalks’ social media efforts, we are here to help you to reach your ideal audience. Our social media marketing efforts include creating multiple posts per webinar across all six major social networks including, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube, using our Xtalks accounts.

Our social media accounts have been grown organically, with industry-focused followers across the life science, medical device and food industries. As such your webinar will be marketed to your members who are already interested and engaged with attending webinars and are working within your subject areas in these industries.

We are constantly studying our social media analytics to support the best practices when posting webinar content at the optimal times with curated captions to encourage our followers to register for your webinar.

When working in tandem with Xtalks’ social media efforts, we encourage you to optimize your own social media channels to promote your webinar, and together, we can collaborate to generate greater exposure and registrant numbers by engaging with each other’s posts. Working directly with our client services team can help facilitate this process. Commenting, liking, tagging and resharing the posts will not only help to achieve your social media goals but will also help to establish your social presence and expand your social media following.

Is your organization active on social media? If you’re hoping to launch your own webinar campaign be sure to contact us and get your social strategy further optimized. Leave us a comment below if you have any questions!