Image Source: Flickr/IntelFreePress

The fundamental design of social media revolves around relationship building; with clients, friends, partners and anyone else. Since your aim as a trade show booth owner is to create business friendly relationships, every possible tool should be used. Social media represents one of the best possible tools of all. By creating a social media friendly environment at your conference booths, you’re making it easy for your entire list of visitors and interested groups to connect with you, stay in tough and exchange vital sales related information with your business down the road or in the moment.

For these reasons, it’s absolutely vital that you create a powerful social media presence at your kiosk and let everyone who visits participate in your company even after they’ve walked away physically.

Let’s go over a few vital tips

1. Reliable Web Access

This is the single most basic and important tool you need to rely on; your WiFi connection. Typically, most modern trade shows are completely WiFi covered and hosted in places with excellent IT infrastructure that allows full multimedia connectivity at all times. However, just to be sure, do your research in advance and make certain that your booth won’t have any problems with establishing a solid internet connection.

In case of problems, you can always also help your situation out by installing wireless repeaters right inside your kiosk, letting you amplify the existing signal. Additionally, try to position yourself on the trade show flow so that you get the best possible direct access to any available signals, as well as electrical outlets, seating and whatever other IT resources are being offered to sellers.

Another great network idea is to create a closed loop WiFi hotspot in your booth that keeps people sticking around in case there isn’t a reliable or strong wireless network in place at the trade show itself.

2. Integrate your Booth with the Trade Shows Social Media Pages

Set yourself up for maximal social media visibility as the show progresses by regularly updating on the event’s social media pages about what you’re offering, any promotions you’ve got going and how you can help people out. You can even offer special contest-like promotions by playing games with visitors and offering giveaways for the first x number of people shat show up in thirty minutes, etc.

Also, don’t forget to interact with anyone who replies online to your posts. Answer questions, clean up doubts and just keep commenting in general so that possible visitors can see your interest in attending them and paying attention instead of just pushing products single-mindedly.

3. Set yourself up as a News Hub

Use your own social media pages, especially your Twitter and Facebook feeds to spread any latest news not just about your own booth, but also about the event in general and even possibly information related to conditions just outside the trade show. By keeping yourself useful in this way, you’ll have more people paying attention to your social feeds and in turn being exposed to your actual customer offers and product promotion.

4. Offer Promotions for Publicity

This is a great way to have other show visitors work for you; instead of hoping for retweets or shares of your latest announcements, get things moving proactively by offering special deals and promotional discounts to any visitors who share or retweet your own social media updates to a certain number of people or a certain number of times. If you create some enticing offers, this could really spread your social media footprint at the trade show.

5. The Power of Foursquare

This location based social media application lets users see where their friends have been visiting if the place is also FourSquare integrated. Make sure you are and offer special deals to anyone who stops by your both and later announces that they checked in there. You can also encourage visitors to leave FourSquare notes about what they saw, what you’re offering and how your products might be useful.

6. Create Convenience

Another excellent idea is to try setting up your booth as a convenient meetup point for buyers and their friends. This way they can use both FourSquare and other social media to have their friends gather around by where you’re selling because you’ve designed the kiosk to be either easy to find or really well designed for stopping by for a break due to seats, free drinks or some other useful little amenity. Designing your booth for visitor convenience is a perfect strategy for creating interest amongst browsing social interconnected buyers.

In the process, collect some heavy interest and maybe even a few sales or buy-ins.

About the Author: Paul Russo has been writing about trade and conference booth topics online for companies like Nimlok Online for more than a decade. When not writing, Paul is generally at home with his family or at the gym training for his next triathlon.