Webinar whizz-through: Using LinkedIn to promote your event & engage your audience

Ticket Tailor recently launched an exciting new integration with LinkedIn, designed to help users of our platform grow thriving, long-lasting communities around their events. 

Last month we ran a webinar with LinkedIn to dig deep into how exactly the relationship between the platform and events can be leveraged. In it, we got to pick the brains of George Labs, who’s own George UX Conf acts as the perfect case study for the above. 

Watch the full webinar here or, if you’re strapped for time, read through our quick whizz-through of key takeaways 👇. 

LinkedIn can be an invaluable tool for event creators 

Elinor Honigstein, who works in Business Development & International Growth Partnerships at LinkedIn, says that the platform is all about conversation and knowledge sharing. This makes it an ideal, opportunity-rich platform for event creators – who by definition are in the business of bringing people together. 

Networking is at the core of events; but there are three unfilled needs that can act as roadblocks:

• Event attendees often have no way of knowing who else will be attending the event. The prospect of walking into a room with potentially thousands of other attendees can be very overwhelming. 
• Even if you do get to see a list of who else is attending, you don’t always get to know anything about them, or how relevant they are to you. So you’re missing out on business value.
• In terms of networking, it’s often really hard to carry the conversation on beyond the life of the event. Attendees delete the event app, and quickly lose touch with those they’ve connected with, as well as the event brand.  

LinkedIn event pages help combat these issues by allowing you to:

• See who else is attending an event
• Invite other people to the event page 
• Share the event widely with your network (with a pre-written message created by you)
• Share content related to the event with an assigned hashtag 

LinkedIn has developed a new integration to boost these advantages even more

Realising the powerful relationship between LinkedIn and events, the platform started testing a new integration that allows event creators to connect their event registration page to their LinkedIn event page seamlessly. The integration works very simply:

When a person buys a ticket or registers to attend an event (for example, on a Ticket Tailor box office page), they then get invited to join the LinkedIn event page too. This means they can see who else is attending the event and connect with them, and also share the event. 

Essentially, LinkedIn is building an additional community layer for events, which can help creators multiply their attendees and enjoy active event communities on the platform.

When LinkedIn tested this feature in a range of countries across the globe, results showed three main value-adds for event creators and their attendees:

• Attendees get to enjoy a much greater depth of knowledge around who else is attending the event.
• Connections benefit from a much greater level of longevity – LinkedIn is here to stay, so any connections made on the platform are long-lasting.
• LinkedIn actively helps people discover events on its platform by surfacing events pages in front of relevant people and networks. This helps event creators to reach new markets and audiences.

Ticket Tailor now offers the LinkedIn integration – here’s how to use it

Here at Ticket Tailor, it’s our mission to make event creators’ lives as simple and efficient as possible. For a while, we were getting feature requests around whether or not it was possible to build any kind of event network via Ticket Tailor or if there was a way for attendees to see who else is attending an event and chat to them. 

So, when LinkedIn approached us about their new integration, it felt like a fantastic opportunity that could really add a lot of value for our customers. 

Essentially, it was a no-brainer. So we went for it!

We’ve got a full written tutorial with accompanying video to walk you through activating the LinkedIn integration in Ticket Tailor:

• Take me to the LinkedIn X Ticket Tailor tutorial >

What type of content works for events on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn’s Elinor is a big advocate for the fact that knowledge and insights are power. In other words: promoting your event through utilising your own expertise and knowledge can be highly effective. (And it’s important not to underestimate how much knowledge you do have – if you’re running events in a certain space, you definitely know a lot of things that other people don’t!)

The same principle applies to tapping into your exhibitors’ knowledge and expertise. Event creators should leverage the fact that their exhibitors want visibility throughout the year, not just the time surrounding your event. Encouraging your exhibitors to post on LinkedIn using your event’s hashtag can be a great way to do this.

Elinor says that two of the main content areas that tend to do really well on LinkedIn are:

• Thought leadership and industry insights: sharing your own knowledge, with a view to genuinely engaging your target audience. Shifting the focus away from acquiring likes and shares; getting engagement from one strong brand is much more powerful than garnering a lot of likes and shares from people who may not have properly read or enjoyed your post. 
• Professional development: LinkedIn’s audience is naturally made up of career-people. There’s a lot to be said for sharing slightly more personal content about your own professional journey in relation to your events brand. This can be really valuable to your audience and can attract the right attention – whether you’re talking about certain skills you’ve learned, an interesting meeting that you’ve had or another relevant professional-personal moment. 

In action: The George UX Conf

An event made by designers for designers, the George UX Conf focuses on: “Connecting, exchanging ideas, and gaining insights into user experiences, design processes, and the future of money.” 

The brains behind the conference are George Labs – the innovative digital finance platform serving more than 9 million people in Europe. 

This was the first time the team in charge of organising George UX Conf had done anything on this scale – making it even more impressive that the event was a rip roaring success.

Of course, we wouldn’t be talking about this if George Labs hadn’t used the Ticket Tailor X LinkedIn integration, which worked brilliantly as part of their promo efforts. So much so that a total of 1,458 tickets were issued for their 2022 hybrid event! (Plus, they got an event satisfaction score of 4.8/5… impressive!)

The team achieved this with a carefully constructed LinkedIn content strategy, which saw them garnering engagement from big brands such as Wise. 

In terms of ticketing, George UX Conf took a three-pronged approach with:

• A dedicated website for the event
• A Ticket Tailor box office page 
• A LinkedIn events page

We loved hearing about this in the webinar because it really does show how powerful marrying LinkedIn with event registration can be. 

A quick Q&A

• What if someone who buys a ticket doesn’t want to be visible on the LinkedIn event page?

No problem! The integration works on an opt-in basis – it’s not compulsory. So someone could simply choose not to join the LinkedIn event page if they didn’t want to.

• Does it matter where the event is hosted for the integration to work?

Nope! It doesn’t matter where in the world it is, or whether it’s physical, virtual or hybrid.

And that’s a wrap! We hope this webinar wizz-through has been useful. Watch this space for more collaborative content from the Ticket Tailor community!