After you've toiled for months putting together a fantastic conference--or even just for a week designing a great booth for a trade show--you're going to want people talking about you when the day comes.

Nowadays, events are meant to reach beyond the actual attendees to a wider audience on social media. You want attendees to have such a great time that they share pictures and quotes on Twitter and other platforms. And you want your company's own social media content to promote the conference to a large following. But how do you do that?

Inc. spoke with Nichole Kelly, CEO of digital marketing company Social Media Explorer, to get some tips on how to get the most out of social media during an event. Soak in her wisdom:

  1. Go kitschy. Whether that means having a photo booth with funny hats and glasses or hanging up a picture of a famous scene, you want something that gets event attendees to take pictures and share them.
  2. Use signage. If you tell your attendees what to do, they'll be more likely to do it. So if you want them to use a hashtag, let them know. Or if you want them to take a selfie in front of a poster, tell them.
  3. Promote your accounts. Make sure attendees know your Twitter handle and Facebook account. That way when they share anything, they can mention you.
  4. Present shareable content. Beyond any sort of gimmick, if you have fantastic speakers and provide valuable content, attendees will be more likely to talk about them in real life and online.
  5. Limit yourself to one hashtag. Certain conferences will create multiple hashtags, one for each session. You don't want to overwhelm attendees. They're not going to remember all of them, and they'll end up using none of them.
  6. Keep it short. You want to make your event hashtag as short as possible. Kelly advises keeping it to one or two words and below 10 to 15 characters. "Especially on Twitter, when people only have 140 characters, you don't want the hashtag to take up too many [of them]," Kelly says.
  7. No acronym hashtags. "You want it to say something that's going to trigger what the event is about," Kelly says. "My least favorite hashtags are ones that are acronyms, because a lot of people don't know what it stands for."
  8. Share yourself. Assign at least one employee to share content from your social media account. If it's good, people will retweet and reshare. "If you become the resource for those documented notes of things that are happening, it goes really well," Kelly says. "If you don't have a blogging platform, you can even do a Google Doc."
  9. Make the content last. Take all of the live blogging from the event and package it together as a takeaway. Let event attendees sign up to receive the package after the event's over.

Once you've checked off everything on Kelly's list, remember the most important factor. If you create and deliver interesting and meaningful content, the sharing will occur naturally.

"Try to think of the audience and give them an experience they'll want to share," Kelly says. "This really is experiential marketing. This is pure experience-driven; it's about giving them an experience and a reason to share it."