How to quickly (and cost-efficiently) monitor social media activity around conferences and trade shows

If you want to skip reading the rest of the article, and if you are interested in results-driving, cost-effective social media and marketing insights from conferences and trade-shows, head directly to The Social View! Otherwise, keep reading on for a little background on how TSV came to be, what it can do for your and your business and where it is headed next!

Over the past three years, I have been involved in a large number of discussions and attended several conferences focusing on the usefulness of collecting social media intelligence (particularly in the healthcare space) and how best to apply the results of such research in order to solve real business issues.

Whilst these questions have not been completely resolved, it would be fair to say that SM intelligence is (more often than not) necessary for every firm / brand or even individual who wants to better understand the business environment they operate in.

Here at LucidQuest and Social Pharma, collecting social media intelligence is something that we routinely do as part of our strategic intelligence and competitive marketing research work, in order to provide our clients with the most comprehensive market and competitor insights possible.

As we do not come from a traditional comms / social listening background, our approach is heavily influenced by our strategic analysis and consulting background, hence both the way we collect our social media intelligence and the way we produce conclusions and recommendations from it, are done with our client's business question / issue in mind...

In other words, we collect the right kind of SM intelligence and at the right time, in order to answer our clients' burning business questions.

As we started doing more and more work in the SM intelligence space, we quickly identified that conferences and trade-shows provided some of the best (if not the best) opportunities to collect key intelligence that can be used to provide insights, conclusions and recommendations for our clients.

If you are asking why, here are some reasons:

• For influencer-driven industries, conference time is the time where online "leading voices" (LVs) come out to play (think KOLs and patient advocates for healthcare for example). One could argue that if an LV is not seen to be active during a relevant conference to their expertise, they are probably not a true LV
• Companies and other commercial entities also are very active during conferences and trade-shows as they understand that this is the place the audience's attention is focused on for a good few days or so
• Patients (for healthcare) or customers (for other industries) are also engaging on SM the most during the time the relevant conferences to them take place
• We currently estimate (based on our own data) that SM activity during conferences is >10x vs. the rest of the time (and that holds true especially for companies and LVs)
• More and more conference organizers are embracing the concept of "online" conferences, whether that means recording and broadcasting event content or to simply broadcast news and insights from the conference on social media
• Conference participants also have started to share more and more on SM (especially on Twitter and Instagram)
• Customers (or patients, if talking about the healthcare industry) are increasingly seeking to find information online, and not just on Google / YouTube but also on SM; so they inevitably end up watching what is happening during relevant conferences and participating in SM discussions

In other words, if one is going to engage in any SM listening activities, they should focus on monitoring conference-related activity for their industry, at least as a starting point.

So, we set out to develop an internal tool that would allow us to do exactly that: monitor SM activity around key conferences and then provide us with the right kind of intelligence that could drive insights for our clients. Some examples below:

• Identification of online leading voices (a.k.a. "Digital Opinion Leaders" or "online KOLs" and their topics of interest, discussions they have etc.
• Company activity and behaviour online (which companies are active online during conferences, what is their comms approach, what is the messaging they use etc.)
• Identification of opportunities and threats for a brand + monitoring of campaign performance
• How are conference "hot topics" (for example new data disclosures) being discussed online and who drives these discussions + insights on audience feedback
• Audience composition (e.g. doctors, patients, pharma companies, advocates etc. in healthcare) and what were their key topics of interest on SM discussions
• Key hashtags and keywords that were popular during the conference
• Insights from both Twitter and Instagram and any differences in audience behaviour on these two platforms
• ...and many more

(We of course combine all of the above with the insights we gather from our offline research to provide comprehensive recommendations for our clients :))

As we further improved and optimized our internal tool, we realized that it had developed into a standalone offering that also happened to fill a gap in the current market: we were now able to provide standalone conference and trade-show social media reports that were both insight-driving (remember we have designed our whole social media listening process with the end in mind, i.e. how to gather the right intelligence at the right time in order to answer our clients' key business questions) and cost-effective (we believe they truly are cost-effective; all our reports are currently under USD 2,000 and they include analysis of key conference highlights + all the other points I mentioned above).

And this is how The Social View came into existence. A "no fuss" online place where you can purchase (without breaking the bank) conference and trade-show social media reports that are relevant to your business and can either be used as they are or as basis for deeper dives in your topics of interest (we also offer bespoke reports :)).

We have started by providing reports for healthcare and medical conferences and we will soon expand into other industries: tobacco, artificial intelligence, cannabis, automotive, digital therapeutics, microbiome, food and nutrition, genetic testing

If you are a marketeer, insights, comms, SM exec. or even a research agency, I am sure you will find our offering interesting; check it out at www.thesocialview.net and feel free to leave a comment below or send an e-mail to [email protected] to have a chat with the team and receive a free report or request us to cover a specific conference.

Thank you!

(You can always reach me here on LinkedIn or at [email protected])