How Should You Use Social Media with Mike Allton

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In this week’s episode of the Event Collab Podcast, we talked with social media strategist Mike Allton about collaboration, social media, making a marketing plan, the virtual change throughout the event industry, and much more.

Mike is a virtual event strategist at The Social Media Hat & Head of Strategic Partnerships at Agorapulse. He hosts The Virtual Event Strategist Podcast and he is the co-author of The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing with Jenn Herman, Stephanie Liu, Amanda Robinson, and Eric Butow.

Here are a few snippets from the episode.

How should you use social media?

“Well, there’s a lot of ways that you can use social media that we couldn't possibly get through in a single recording. I’ll start with one idea, and that idea is: let’s go with a video-first strategy and let’s create short video snippets.

The thing about social media is, I didn’t open up Facebook this morning to learn about your event. I didn’t go to social media to read a long blog post about an event or a press release, or watch a 30-minute trailer video about what I didn’t do, that’s just not why I’m on social media.

So you hear people talk a lot about creating, snackable content, bite-sized content, short-form video content, and this is why.

With a 30-second video clip, you have a much greater likelihood of capturing my attention for that 30 seconds.”

As someone who has these great marketing skills, how do you use them when planning an event?

“Virtual events are typically used to market a business and generate sales so they’re considered a marketing tactic but they're also kind of their own business and their own product.

So when you’re creating a virtual event, the best way to go about doing it and creating that virtual event is to approach it as though it’s its own product.

This means you must do product analysis, market fit messaging, client analysis.

You need to think about, ‘what are we trying to accomplish’ with this event?”

In your process between you and your team whether it's planning an event, coaching, or even on the social media side, how does collaboration play into that for you?

“There’s a lot of levels to that.

There’s the internal collaboration within the team, which is pretty cool.

So at AgoraPulse, we have a marketing ops team, a design team, the entire rest of the marketing team, and we have our sales team.

And so every step of the way, we’re using Asana to plan out the entire event structure of every upcoming event.

Where it's going to happen.

What it's going to look like.

All these different moving pieces, and then we add tasks so we can collaborate on all of the design elements you’re going to need.”

As always, thank you for tuning in to the Event Collab podcast, where we feature people in the event industry and beyond who collaborate to make events and human connections more memorable. Check out our full conversation with Mike here.