I recently attended the Social Media Summit, which took place in Dublin on March 1-2, at the resplendent Aviva Stadium. Billed as the ‘largest gathering of Social Media professionals in Ireland, ever….”, it was an opportunity not to let pass by.
Given the ‘conference’ fever Dublin has experienced over the past few years, mainly down to the stellar growth of the Web Summit, it was an ideal location to ‘up sticks’ for a few days and immerse myself in the latest social media trends, meet some globally renowned speakers and engage in some valuable networking. Now that the Web Summit is relocating to Lisbon, Portugal, there is a gap to fill for such events in Dublin, and the Social Media Summit could just be the one.
Day one consisted a number of different workshops , held by some of the worlds leading social media professionals, including Melonie Dodaro, author of the #1 international best seller, The LinkedIn code, Steve Dotto , billed as Canada’s favourite geek who is now building a very successful YouTube channel, along with various representatives from agencies and social media companies (including Twitter) .
Steve Dotto @ Social Media Summit. Image credit: www.socialmediasummit.ie
For day two , we were treated to some amazing talks and tips from a number of world-class speakers, including the keynote Ted Rubin, a leading social media strategist and CMO of Brand Innovators, Brian Fanzo, a leading voice of the millennial generation for digital media and Jack Murray, founder of MediaHQ
There were a lot of great insights and advice on tools ( both free and paid) to deploy, in terms of how to plan your social media activity and distribute content across owned, earned and paid media. We were also lucky enough to get some great , free , valuable information on how to successfully audit facebook campaigns, better understand buyer decision-making ( marketing psychology) , creating successful digital PR campaigns ( see slideshare below) and using Snapchat, Instagram and Pinterest for your business nice!
Digtial PR Strategy in 8 Steps from Digital Training Institute
Am sure you wont be surprised to hear this , but visual content marketing featured heavily as an enabler and using branded visual content to educate, entertain, engage and inspire your audience, is, and will continue to be, a top priority. Here at team VISU.AL , it’s what we know, it’s what we do well so always good to see validation from the worlds leading social media professionals.
In some earlier blog posts, we looked at the rise of visual social media and how users have embraced the shift from text to visuals. Images are being showcased everywhere and thanks to Pinterest, Instagram and blogging sites like Tumblr we can now devour information quicker than we ever have before.With news that Pinterest is now the 2nd largest driver of traffic and Instagram has the highest engagement rate out of any social media platform, it only seems sensible that businesses start incorporating visual content into their social media marketing strategies. With so many social media platforms out there, we can easily be overwhelmed with information and visual content acts as a good ‘thumb stopper’ on your daily scrolling activities.
Video advertising is THE most important medium , as confirmed by many of the speakers , including Steve Dotto, who has achieved great success on his YouTube platform ( think of it primarily as a search engine). One of our previous blog posts highlighted the benefits of using motion graphic videos to communicate your message effectively.
A big emphasis was placed on Analytics- there are so many great tools out there to help you, many of them free, so not including this in any planned activity , means that you are planning to fail – it’s as simple as that.
I’ll be posting a blog post shortly – Visualise , Socialise , Analyse, which covers some tips and advice on planning social media activity across, paid ,owned and earned media , so keep a look out.
So all in all , a solid and successful inaugural event for the Social Media Summit team. On that note, a generous hat tip towards the organisers, Samantha Kelly and Tom Williams. Their passion and enthusiasm spilled over and permeated the crowd as well as the presenters who were genuine, engaging and insightful. Looking forward to some more heavy hitters in 2017.
Samantha Kelly and Tom Williams. Image credit: www.socialmediasummit.ie
If you have any questions to do with visual content and social media planning, feel free to get in touch for a no obligation chat
