Show organizers using Gleanin, a social referral marketing platform for exhibitions, can now offer their event registrants the ability to use WhatsApp to broadcast their participation and invite their friends and colleagues to attend. 

Since the inception of Gleanin Connect, Gleanin’s social referral marketing tool, visitors have been able to broadcast their event attendance through social media channels including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as invite their contacts via email.

Immediately available to all Gleanin customers and their registrants, the additional WhatsApp functionality not only helps facilitate a new level of social sharing, but also gives organizers another marketing channel from which to acquire, convert and grow event registrations, according to Gleanin officials.

“We currently work with over 400 events worldwide and so have been able to carefully see trends in the visitor registration process,” said Peter Richards, CTO of Gleanin.

He continued, “We expect mobile registration to steadily increase, as will the importance of a great mobile experience. Our company goal is to provide a technology which allows attendees to be able to broadcast their event attendance with their friends and colleagues via their preferred platform.”

Currently, 15 percent of event registrations are completed over a mobile device and with a predicted 2.5 billion smartphone users by 2019, this percentage is only set to increase, he added.

Owned by Facebook, WhatsApp is known as the world’s most popular messaging application that boasts a global user base of more than one and a half billion. With visitors more likely to attend an event when referred by a colleague, referral marketing is quickly becoming one of the most effective new channels for event marketers.

By allowing registered visitors to invite their WhatsApp contacts to attend an event, show organizers who use Gleanin Connect now have the ability to reach new potential visitor audiences like never before, according to Tamar Beck, CEO of Gleanin.

“At Gleanin, we passionately believe that mobile is the future for event marketing,” Beck said. “Adding WhatsApp functionality to our platform means our customers now have access to one of the largest messaging platforms in the world.”

She continued, “With any new marketing channel, reporting results is vital and so, of course we track how many registrants share via WhatsApp and how many registrations that drives. For so long, registration has simply been a data capture exercise. But now, we can harness the power of the attendee to help extend marketing reach beyond what has previously thought possible.”