An Investigation into the Use of Social Media Marketing and Measuring its Effectiveness in the Events Industry

1. An Investigation into the Use of Social
Media Marketing and Measuring its
Effectiveness in the Events Industry
Alessandro Inversini
Emma Sykes
School of Tourism
Bournemouth University, United Kingdom
ainversini@bournemouth.ac.uk
emma.sykes@hotmail.com
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2. Introduction
In the last few years it has been shown an increase
up to 90% of event producers using one or more
social platforms (Hughes, 2012).
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3. Social Media
• Social media is a popular marketing tool
• Difficulties persists particularly related to:
– ROI & effectiveness (Hoffman and Fodor 2010, Dzamic,
2012).
• Several authors/organizations proposed
– frameworks
– measurement metrics
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4. Measurement is a vital part in the success of social
media (Murdough 2009; Solis 2011).
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5. Social Media Measurement (i)
The literature reveals a number of social
media measurement words,
–
–
–
–
–
loyalty (e.g. Evans, 2008; Castronovo and Huang, 2012)
influence (e.g. Blowers, 2012)
awareness (e.g. Fisher, 2009; Hoffman and Fodor, 2010)
engagement (e.g. Li, 2010; Sterne, 2010; Blowers, 2012)
reputation (e.g. Dzamic, 2011; Marchiori and Cantoni, 2012)
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6. Social Media Measurement (ii)
Examples of measurement frameworks
– Social Media Council Framework (IAB SMC, 2010)
– Social Media Strategy Funnel (Schottmuller, 2012)
– Social Media Measurement Framework (Owyang
and Lovett, 2010)
– Community Engagement Framework (Powell et
al.,2011)
– The Engagement Pyramid (Li, 2010)
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7. Why Event Industry?
• From 30% to 90% of event producers using one or
more social media platforms. (Hughes, 2012)
– Twitter to increase engagement both before an event
(Hambrick, 2012) and during (Ross et al., 2011),
remaining constantly in contact with attendees (Lee et
al., 2012).
– Facebook enhances brand awareness and potentially
result in the purchase of a ticket. (Ellison et al., 2007),
aids interaction prior to an event (Lee et al., 2012).
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8. Research Objectives
• To explore the effects of social media on marketing
communications in the technology events industry.
• To understand whether event companies and
brands are employing consumer centric social
media marketing strategies.
• To evaluate how event companies and brands are
measuring social media in their marketing
campaigns.
• To discover how extensively social media is used in
the technology events industry and what channels
are utilized during and after an event.
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9. Interviews
Company
Participant (P)
A
P1
Digital Media Marketing Manager
P2
P3
P4
P5
P6
Marketing Coordinator
Senior Conference Manager
Social Media Assistant
Marketing Director
President
B
C
Function
Exploratory, multi-case study, qualitative approach.
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10. Effects of Social Media
“We saw an increase of almost thirty percent of new
followers through Twitter...from our campaign compared
to twenty-eleven” (P1A).
“On Twitter we used to have like eight thousand followers
and we just actually this week hit the twenty thousand
mark” (P3).
“Level of communication, engagement, response they
were like...huge increase and really obvious” (P5).
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11. Measuring Social Media
“One thing I do is..I always measure is..the website
traffic..that each..social channel generates to our
website.” (P1)
“We use Google analytics so we track a lot of the
like..the..we put links on like Twitter or Facebook, we
put in tracking URL’s and then on the back end look at
Google analytics”. (P2)
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12. Measuring Social Media
“If someone has ‘liked’ something so many times
you assume immediately that you understand that
this is something that they do..if they retweet”. (P6)
“I think the hardest thing is quantifying engagement
it’s very difficult”. (P3)
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13. Audiences
“so we don’t really differentiate the audience right
now” whilst further stating, “we’re just limited on
resources..but that’s one of the things we definitely
want to focus on more”. (P1)
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14. Social Media Usage
“Right now it is just kinda a drop in the bucket..but
you know..we..I’m trying to let the senior level
people know that it’s..very important” (P1)
“We are lucky over here because our MD is really
social and he’s a marketing guy deep down..and
he’s, you know massively into social media so we
don’t have to..convince him of the sort of..need to
use it”. (P3)
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15. Social Media Usage
“no person on the management team is going to
care here if we go on about the fact that we got
twenty thousand followers, it’s a nice number to
say..but all they are going to be like is yes but
how many did you convert”. (P3)
“she’s just going to care about the money”. (P3)
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16. Conclusions
• Increase in interactivity with customers in event
industry (Obj.1)
• Strategies are not explicitly consumer centric (Obj.2)
• Tangible measures are important for management.
Frameworks are recognized as important but not used
(Obj.3)
• The extent to which social media is used depends on
management’s commitment (Obj.4)
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