How to get your team to post from the show

Why the team outperforms the page

LinkedIn shows a person's post to that person's network first, and a network of relevant contacts built over a career is a better audience than a company page's followers. A post from a sales engineer saying she is at GITEX this week reaches the people she has met at previous shows, who are exactly the people who might walk over to the stand. The company page post reaches whoever follows the page, which at most exhibitors is a mix of staff, suppliers and job seekers. The arithmetic is simple: twelve people posting four times each over a show week is forty-eight posts into forty-eight networks, against the page's three or four. None of this happens on its own, and the reason is not reluctance, it is friction: no photograph they like, nothing to say, no time.

Give them something worth posting

People do not post bad photographs of themselves. Portraits taken before the doors open, individually against the stand branding, with controlled light, are the first thing in the shared folder on the evening of day one. The portrait session takes two minutes per person and runs from 09:15 to 09:45 while the stand is clean; the crew works through the team in whatever order they arrive. Each person also gets one photograph of themselves in a real conversation with a visitor, taken from the edge of the stand with a long lens during the day, so that nobody is interrupted and nobody is posing. For the people giving demos, a fifteen-second vertical clip of the demo with them in frame. That is the raw material: one portrait, one conversation, one clip per person, over three days. See team portraits in the glossary.

Make it a ten-second job

The portraits arrive in a shared folder per person, named with their name, so nobody scrolls through 200 photographs looking for themselves. With the folder comes a one-line caption prompt, not a script: 'I'm at GITEX this week, Hall 4 stand B20. Come and see the new…' The company hashtag and the link to the stand or the product page are at the bottom to copy. The whole package is sent by WhatsApp to each person on the evening of day one, because WhatsApp is where the stand team already is during a show week. The people who post are the ones who did not have to think; a personal sentence added to the prompt outperforms a corporate paragraph every time.

Timing across the show week

• Day one, evening: the portrait and the clean stand reveal. The caption says where the stand is and invites people over for days two and three.
• Day two, morning: the conversation photograph from day one. The caption names the kind of conversation, not the visitor, unless the visitor agreed.
• Day three: the vertical demo clip, or a photograph of the signing, the award or the press moment if there was one.
• The week after: the team photograph and a thank-you to the visitors, with the recap film from the company page tagged in.

Four posts per person over a week, each with an asset that is already in their folder. The marketing manager posts the page content on the same rhythm, so the team's posts and the page's posts reinforce each other in the feed. Our guide to turning one show day into a month of LinkedIn content covers the page side in detail.

Permissions and consent

Tell the team before the show, in the pre-show briefing email, that portraits will be taken on the morning of day one and shared with them for their own use, and that anyone who prefers not to be photographed says so and is left out without discussion. That sentence removes the awkwardness on the day. Visitors who appear recognisably in a team member's photograph were asked on the day by the crew or the team member; where nobody has asked, the crew photographs conversations from angles where the visitor is in profile or from behind. Other exhibitors' stands and branding stay out of frame. Competitors' logos in the background of a LinkedIn post are a problem the edit cannot fix.

A worked example: twelve people at GITEX

A software company with a 54 square metre stand at GITEX Global at Expo City Dubai brings twelve people: four sales, three pre-sales engineers who demo, two marketing, three executives. Day one, 09:15: portraits of everyone present, eleven of twelve, the twelfth on day two. 19:30: twelve folders sent by WhatsApp with the prompt. By 22:00, seven people have posted. Day two: conversation photographs from day one go into the folders at midday; the three engineers get their demo clips on day three. Over the week, nine of the twelve post at least twice, and every one of those posts names the company and the stand. The two who never post were never going to, and nobody chased them.

What goes wrong, and what LUMIQ delivers

The common failures: portraits taken at 14:00 with visitors in the background, so nobody uses them; one folder for everyone, so nobody finds themselves; captions written as press releases; the folder arriving after the show. The fix is the system above, and the one thing it needs from the client is a list of the team's names and WhatsApp numbers before the show, plus a sentence in the briefing about the portraits. LUMIQ delivers per-person folders on request as part of trade show photography coverage: portrait, conversation photographs and vertical clips per person, the same evening, with usage rights for their own channels included. The marketing manager receives the full set and the recap film as usual. See how we work with marketing managers.