Using social media to promote events is more necessary than ever. It’s accessible, it’s easy and everyone is on social media anyway.
- POST REGULARLY ABOUT YOUR EVENT
Posting once in a while about your event you won’t get the awareness you need to get people to join. Make people feel as if they are going to miss out. Post regularly across all your channels and make sure that you include a link to your website or event page in every post.
- RUN COMPETITIONS
To encourage people to share your posts, run a competition before or during the event. For instance, if you are organising a fun run, ask your followers to take photos of themselves training for the event and to share those photos on social media. Offer them a prize like a t-shirt, food-hamper or free race entry. Competitions encourage sharing so you could get loads of new followers or event attendees this way.
- CREATE A HASHTAG
During the event, and even before, use hashtags and also make sure that someone is live-tweeting about the event and retweeting any posts made by those attending. You can also set up live streaming through platforms like Meercat, so people can watch online and see what they are missing out on.
- REAL-TIME RESPONSES
Social media users expect real-time responses, especially on Twitter. So if queries or complaints go unanswered for longer than 24 hours, they may either lose interest or become extremely frustrated by your lack of engagement. Make sure someone who is as invested in the campaign as you are is there to manage online comments, queries and complaints. Make it super easy and fun for people to work with you. And a sense of humour won’t hurt either!
MANAGE THE GRAM
As of November 2017, Instagram was the third most popular social media site – after Facebook and YouTube. It has approximately 800 million users, and is proving to be one of the best platforms for brands to engage with their audience effectively, largely because:
- 200 million accounts look at a business profile each day
- one in three small business on Instagram say they built their business using the platform
- 45% of small businesses on Instagram say they have increased their sales because of Instagram
