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All You Need to Know About Hybrid Events

Hybrid events are designed to bring together elements of traditional face-to-face events with large-scale online communications and interactions, including sharing photos/videos/social posts about the event.

Successful hybrid events blend technology with live face-to-face activities, providing opportunities for educating people on social media platforms while enabling them to connect with other participants in real-time.

What is a Virtual Event?

Virtual events can be conferences, webinars, telesummits, and more held online or via teleconference by people like Conf42 (who you can learn more about on their website). Attendees can virtually attend from their homes or offices but do not get together in person.

What is a Hybrid Event?

A hybrid event is an online-offline experience where physical interaction between attendees occurs during at least one portion of the live program (ex: Q&A segment).

Hybrid events still feature all of the elements of a typical virtual event (webinar playback opportunities, presentations, and speaker interviews) and add in some interactive elements (workshops and panel discussions with live participation) to drive deeper engagement and foster more meaningful connections.

Hybrid events offer the best parts of multiple event concepts into a single marketing strategy. Here are three hybrid events examples:

  • Apple Special Event
  • Social Media Marketing World
  • MozCon

Hybrid Events and Your Total Event Strategy

If you want your event to have a strong online presence, then a hybrid event might be just what you’re looking for! Your entire event strategy must include both face-to-face activities as well as social media engagement.

A successful hybrid event will incorporate at least one element where people actively use social media to share photos, videos, posts, and other communications in real-time.

Advantages of a Hybrid Event

The main benefit of holding a hybrid event is that it’s an opportunity to connect face-to-face with online engagement. The event itself doesn’t have to be live (although it can be).

A hybrid event strategy can help you increase awareness of your brand by encouraging consumers to share their opinions and experiences with others on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

It also provides attendees with information about what other people are saying/thinking about your organization/brand, which helps improve future events and establish valuable customer feedback.

When done correctly, a successful hybrid event will allow participants to engage independently during the actual physical events or conferences within large associations and stay engaged after the event ends. To organize the event, you only need to use a hybrid meetings and events platform.

A benefit of a hybrid event is that you don’t have to wait until your next big face-to-face event (conference, trade show, etc.) to promote audience engagement. You can share photos/videos online as soon as they’re uploaded during an event.

Types of Hybrid Events

There are many ways that open space or large scale conferences can incorporate social media into their event strategy:

All Social Media Event

At its most basic level, organizations host a physical event and rely exclusively on face-to-face engagement for marketing purposes. This works well with small groups but isn’t very efficient with larger audiences, where it’s easier to reach more people by combining online and offline activities.

Short Live Event + Social Media

This type of hybrid event is perfect for an organization that wants to mix in a few live sessions and other activities but doesn’t want to replace all face-to-face engagement with online participation.

All Social Media Event with Live Sessions

This is the best option for organizations that want to focus on speaking engagements and other forms of entertainment while engaging their audience non-stop through social media during the actual conference itself.

The best events are those where people can go from one live session to another without ever being in an auditorium or meeting room.

Long Live Event + Social Media

Meetings and conferences focused almost entirely on educational opportunities will benefit significantly by including social media into the equation. Rather than only hearing the expert speakers, you can ask questions and listen to answers almost instantly.

Long Social Media Event + Live Sessions

This is the way to go when your organization wants to focus on building its social media presence and hosting a series of open spaces for people to visit during the physical event itself.

These sessions create an added incentive for participants to attend in person as they’ll want to experience these moments firsthand with their friends online as well as those they know offline.

Core Elements, Goals, and Advantages of Hybrid Events

A successful hybrid event will do two things: make face-to-face experiences more manageable and more attractive by adding digital components, attract new followers/readers/listeners through social media so that attendees don’t feel like they’re missing out on something important when they’re not at the event in person.

A core element of every unique hybrid event includes live streaming (or other forms of broadcasting). Doing this will make it easier for people outside your targeted area to experience the same things you do in real-time and gain insights through video content recorded during different speaking engagements.

The main benefit of having a hybrid strategy is that participants can attend sessions and connect with speakers and their peers online even if they cannot visit in person or don’t have access to transportation.

The result will be increased brand visibility through branded hashtag campaigns where keynotes and speakers will use their networks combined with the physical event to create a social media presence for your organization.

The more you integrate into the hybrid strategy, the better results from those who attend both online and offline. To maintain momentum after an event is over, it’s important to keep sharing content through social media and writing about what happened during different sessions within a face-to-face engagement.

How to Create a Successful Hybrid Event

An open space or large scale conferences where attendees typically aren’t engaged throughout the entire event can create a successful hybrid event by combining live events with social media components:

  1. Start at least two weeks before the physical conference occurs by creating a schedule of speakers and breakout sessions.
  2. Make sure to include branded hashtags on every page to easily access social media content from a mobile device or a computer.
  3. Use your social media accounts to share information about speakers and their past experiences so that participants have a better understanding of who they’ll be hearing from during different sessions.
  4. Schedule at least one person for live streaming/ broadcasting purposes during the conference itself. This will help you build a bigger audience outside your city while also engaging those in real-time who want to attend but don’t have access to transportation.

Tips for Making an Event Hybrid

Here are six tips to help you make the transition from virtual events to hybrids:

  1. First, decide what kind of engagement you want to receive from your audience (ex: Ask questions in real-time, etc.).
  2. Second, decide what kind of technology is necessary for this engagement to happen seamlessly (live chat rooms and polls work well).
  3. Third, pick a day and time that works best for attendees (regardless of when it is in their time zones).
  4. Fourth, be sure to build out some social media buzz beforehand, so attendees have extra incentive to attend live and join the virtual conversation.
  5. Fifth, really hone in on your audience and what they want out of your event (ex: Do they typically attend events as a group or as individuals? etc.).
  6. And last but not least, provide ample time for audience engagement during and after the event is live. You don’t want to end up with a lot of questions going unanswered.

Conclusion

The best advantages you get from hybrid events are the core elements of allowing people to experience what matters most by attending online and offline. I recommend testing out all before deciding how much integration you want within your overall strategy.

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