Events are a central part of what CMI offer, and of course my new role at IQPC will heavily revolve around attracting people to our events. So it was interesting to see news today about changes to LinkedIn Events.
The update has seen a few major feature additions, including:
Connecting events with your network
Lets say you do a lot of networking in a particular industry. With the new changes you can see what events those in your network are attending, which is a nice way of finding out what are the hot events in your industry.
Your LinkedIn ‘Events Home’ now lists out events that your connections are attending and gives event recommendations based on your location, industry and other factors.
New events search
The events search engine has also been revamped so you can now filter events by location, industry and time so you can easily find the events you're looking for.
Open delegate list
Something that's often bothered me about many networking events is that you never know who's attending, so you have to go around staring at peoples chests in order to read their name badges.
With the new LinkedIn Events you can see who's attending each event, and a really nice feature is a list of 'attendees you may want to meet', so LinkedIn have done a bit of leg work for you. With that list you can obviously get in touch before the event so you're not bumbling around trying to meet complete strangers.
If you want to do your own work then you can filter the list by industry and so on.
Better event promotion
Obviously if you're putting on an event you want as many people to attend as possible, so sharing your event with the right groups is essential. The new Events area lets your event appear in search results, you can share it with your personal network (or groups you belong to) and even add a logo.
A tidy events calendar
I'm pretty bad at organising myself, so the events calendar is a handy way of not only being reminded of the time and date, but the location, venue and so on.
So all in all a nice update and worth adding to your event promotion arsenal. It's raised an interesting question however of how to mash together event data if you were to promote your event on places like LinkedIn, EventBrite, Facebook and so on. That's for my next blog I think.
Pingback: Managing events when they’re promoted on social media | Adi Gaskell says...
I must say that I've never really had much joy promoting events via LinkedIn, probably as so few people seem to use the events area of the site. Maybe this update will change that.