Dormant to Dynamic: A Social Media Success Story

A leading dermatological foundation focused on continuing education had no problem selling registrations to multiple annual conferences. Yet they didn't have the staff to consistently manage their social media channels, especially during conferences, resulting in significant lost opportunities to improve attendee engagement while expanding brand awareness through best-in-industry thought leadership and building a larger audience to support the development of new conferences.

I worked with the foundation from 2020-2023, beginning their live event social media management in a tough spot: a virtual conference during COVID-19 lockdown. The upside? The annual fall conference fell over Halloween, giving us an opportunity to host an Instagram-based costume contest that received widespread participation.

Once conferences returned to in-person experiences in the fall of 2021, I continued to lead the expansion and refinement of their social media strategy during fall and winter conferences. We focused on Instagram and Twitter, especially Instagram stories, to showcase conference highlights, announce breaking news and create higher registration demand for future conferences — FOMO!

Instagram Stories made attendee engagement as easy as possible through interactive features like polls, Q&A and tagging. I also developed bingo cards that were distributed to each attendee. Once they hit bingo and had the corresponding selfies to prove it, they would be entered to win prize drawings. Bingo quickly became a favorite conference activity and also created a steady stream of UGC that the foundation could easily repurpose to show appeal and impact.

Results:

Consistent delivery of engagement-first organic social content enabled the foundation to reach more than 1 million impressions of unique conference hashtags for three consecutive years, 2021-2023. Social media strategies developed for these hallmark conferences led to an opportunity to manage social media for additional niche conferences that targeted a more specific group of dermatology professionals.

My Responsibilities:

Social media strategy development and management, on-site content creation (including video interviews, distillation of presentations into relevant takeaways and photography), customer service support and active channel monitoring to foster engagement through comments and reshares.