Social media provides you with a great platform to reach your target audience and generate interest in your events. It doesn’t require any expert knowledge or skills, just a little bit of time and attention.
Part of the time to do this requires some effort thinking about a specific strategy to reach your audience and inspire them to socially share your posts and create a hype around your events. The end goal of course should be selling tickets to your events and creating an urgency to take action and register for upcoming events!
Here are 18 ways to use Social Media to promote events.
#1: Plan your strategy.
Planning your event strategy is a key to organizing successful events. For example, if you are organizing a fundraising event for a non-profit organization, you’ll want to think about what type of “attendee persona” would be most interested in contributing to your organization’s mission. If you are a pet shelter for instance, your goal will be to appeal to animal lovers in your community. From there, you can get more specific about how to reach those people and create the type events that would appeal to your audience.
Then after you know more details about the type of event that you want to create for your specific audience, you can identify possible event locations, or venues that will be the best fit for your event.
Read this related post: Great Events Don’t Just Happen! They Are Carefully Planned.
#2: Use Social Media to Drive Ticket Sales
Facebook provides a great platform for promoting events. According to a recent study, 1.4 billion people use Facebook Groups which is a great way to reach a targeted audience with specific interests. You can search groups that would be of interest to the “attendee personas” that you created and post your event information to share with these groups.
Keep in mind that using Facebook, or any other social media platform to promote your event requires that you plan ahead and follow a strategy in order to maximize the use of these great tools.
For example, you will want to start your posting ahead of your event registration period to inform your audience of the event details and to let them know when they can register online for the event. Be sure to set up pages in advances on all applicable social media platforms so that attendees and search engines can all find your event information ahead of time.
Then as the event date nears you can create a sense of urgency by sharing updates about ticket numbers left or by sharing any special promotions. Learn more about offering Promotions and Discounts here.
#3: Understand How to Use Facebook In Early Event Promotion
Again, it takes a bit of planning to really leverage Facebook for your event promotions. You will want to think about creating content early, that is relevant to your events, but not directly tied to a specific event. The end goal being to build out content that would interest your targeted event audience. This should be part of your “early promotional strategy”.
For example, if you are planning a fun – walk/run for charity, you will want to start posting information about your charity and highlight some of your accomplishments in helping people or the community where you do your work. Discuss the reason for the event, the location of the event, the staff and sponsors involved, etc. This can help your potential attendees understand what you do and where the funds go to when they sign up for an event.
Then as your event nears, you can start posting information about the event and inform them of how they can register for the event online. You can even use the “embed” option in Event Smart to post the registration form right into your Facebook page.
Read more about using Facebook to boost your ticket sales: How to Boost Ticket Sales With Free Facebook Marketing
#4: Choose Your Event Hashtag
Using hashtags for your events can help you to attract more attention and gain new followers, which may lead to more exposure and more event attendees. When thinking of good event hashtags, try to make them short and easy to understand. To find hashtags to use for your event, try doing a google search like this “popular hashtags for dog-lovers” for example (substitute “dog-lovers” for a topic relevant to your event type).
You can also use event hashtags to post on social media during your event which allows you to extend your reach beyond those attending your event. This can help you to gain more followers and thus help to potentially gain even more attendees for the next event.
Consider asking your venue to help in sharing your content to their audiences on social media.
#5: Use Instagram To Drive Ticket Sales
Instagram provides yet another platform to reach even more people. The posting on Instagram is a bit different than Facebook as it is really a more visually driven platform, so you will want to take advantage of the use of great images to capture your audience’s attention. So using our same example when planning a “fun walk/run” to raise awareness and funds for your animal charity, you can share pictures of the animals that your organization has helped in the past and remind people that they can also help by attending events and etc.
Remember to use the hashtags you created when sharing your posts on Instagram! That will help you to reach a wider audience.
#6: Use Linkedin To Encourage Event Networking
Lastly, you can encourage people to connect even further by creating a Linkedin group and letting your followers and event attendees know that it is a space for them to network, share ideas, and connect even more with your organization. Though Linkedin is not for every organization as it caters to the business-to-business (B2B) space much more than a consumer crowd, it can be an incredibly effective way to connect with customers and potential event attendees. It’s great for gauging interest and finding out more about your target attendees. That way you can use this information in your event planning to help you to create successful events.
Infographic courtesy of Total Event Resources. Download this infographic here.
Leave a Reply