InstallerSHOW has always been a place for its community to enjoy more than just the wealth of products and solutions on display – so much so that it used to be marketed as The Great Industry Get-Together. And while that social element continues to thrive in-person, there’s a second social aspect to the event that has seen phenomenal growth.
This year saw extraordinary engagement with InstallerSHOW related content on social media. Impressions across our own channels were in excess of 7.5 million since the beginning of February 2023, when registration for the show opened. Factoring in content generated by our stakeholders adds millions to that number.
The correlation between this engagement and the increase in visitors to the show over recent years is clear and, although it’s only a small part of the marketing mix, it’s undeniably a valuable one.
It can present its own challenges though. In its early years, InstallerSHOW pioneered the use of plumbers and heating engineers on Twitter as ambassadors – not in the way that we recognise influencer content today, but as genuine advocates for a show that they had attended, valued, and wanted to share with their peers. Almost all of those installers still go to great lengths to promote the show in an authentic way that an influencer doing it for the money never could. But where that promotion takes place has shifted dramatically.
Rumours of Twitter’s demise have most certainly not been exaggerated, at least in our experience. The migration began pre-pandemic as Instagram’s more visual ethos took hold. Insta is now by far the dominant social platform for both our exhibitors and visitors. Usage analysis of the #InstallerSHOW2023 hashtag shows that Instagram outstrips all other channels combined, with LinkedIn taking second place.
Catering for those two platforms alone requires a clearly defined strategy. Duplicating content simply will not be effective – there are different demands in terms of tone, length and detail. However, success is determined by meeting those demands and the results entirely justify the extra input.
