Use Social Media to Enhance your Experiences of Events

Have you ever felt a bit nervous about attending a retreat, workshop, convention or other gathering where you know few, if any, of the participants?

Before social media, all we could do was show up at the event and do our best to feel comfortable with these strangers.

Now we have all kinds of alternatives.

One person who follows my Boomers’ Social Media Tutor Facebook page recently wrote about how she used the friending feature of Facebook to help her get to know fellow participants of an upcoming writers retreat.

Luckily for her, the organization sponsoring the retreat had set up the retreat as an event on Facebook. So, all my friend had to do was to go to the event, see who else was going to the retreat, and then friend the other participants.

Fortunately for her, they all friended her back.

She did this several months before the event, which gave her plenty of time to get to know these folks before she ever met them in person.

By the time she met the fellow retreat attendees in person, they felt like long lost friends both personally and professionally.

Through making an admittedly brave overture to these individuals, she helped to ease the stress of meeting all these strangers at once. Plus I would hazard a guess that her overall experience of the retreat was more fulfilling than it would have been had she gone into that event “cold.”

Not all functions have such lists of attendees on Facebook. However, if you are planning to attend some kind of function and you believe at least some of your social media connections will be there, be sure to announce your plans via your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter status reports well in advance of the event.

And announce your plans more than once, as many people will just dip in and out of their news feeds for their social media sites.

In your status reports, invite your connections to reach out to you through that social media site to plan some quality time at the event.

Let’s say that I am planning to attend the Toastmasters International Convention August 21-24 in Cincinnati. It isn’t too early for me to let my LinkedIn connections know about my plans. I would focus on LinkedIn, as that’s where I am more connected with Toastmasters than I am on Facebook or Twitter.

Have you used social media to help you get the most out of an upcoming event? I would love to hear your experiences.

Joyce Feustel, Founder of Boomers’ Social Media Tutor, helps people relatively new to social media to become more effective and comfortable in their use of this medium.  Find her at www.boomerssocialmediatutor.com