By
Bradley Woodgate
Social media is being used more and more to make events fun and engaging, to draw in large online audiences and get the message out to as many people as possible. Finding innovative ways to use these platforms should be at the front of your mind if you want to
become a successful event manager.
I’ve put together my five favourite uses of social media for events this year, so you can learn from the best out there.
The most retweeted image to date, racking up at over 2 million shares. The photo, which consisted of some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, had such a huge impact it even crashed the social media site.
Twitter was used massively during this year’s Oscars, with reports of over 14.7 million Oscar related tweets sent throughout the show. You can check out this rather cool infographic about the stats behind
Twitter’s reaction to the Oscars.
2. MTV Video Music Awards
In a first for the event, they actively encouraged viewers to vote for their favourite act by using hashtags on Twitter, Instagram and Vine. They even used Vine to release the nominations in the form of stop motion animations in the
#RoadToTheVMAs campaign. Check out the nomination Vines
here.
3. London Fashion Week (LFW)
LFW is HUGE. It’s a global money making machine! The UK fashion industry has a £26 billion stake in the economy alone, so it’s no surprise that LFW was buzzing with social media activities.
LFW brought us live streaming, Q&A over Twitter, selfies and Vines from top models and we were given exclusive backstage access via Instagram and Pinterest. Topshop even created a virtual catwalk in their store and Burberry streamed the event live in 3D.
There must have been some very happy event managers out there when these briefs came through the door.
4. #StephensStory – Teenager cancer fundraising campaign
Stephen is a teenager who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Through social media, Stephen has managed to reach out to the masses to maximise his fundraising campaign.
Celebrities have supported him which has increased awareness of this admirable charitable event. Twitter and Facebook have been used to create a chain reaction of retweets, comments, shares and likes and Stephen’s JustGiving page has since managed to raise over £3 million and continues to rise.
You can contribute to this amazing campaign right
here.
NASA asked for people from all over the world to take photos of themselves for
Earth Day and, using photos tagged
#GlobalSelfie, they will create a mosaic of the earth.
NASA are reaching out to the masses via social media to raise awareness for this awesome event, and are giving the public the opportunity to become part of something much bigger than themselves. Check out the progress of the event right
here.
Read more about Earth Day in
our recent post about The World’s Most Eco-Friendly Events.
Image by Derzsi Elekes Andor under the Creative Commons license, via Wikimedia Commons 
