Social media has become a great method for not only events marketing, but also creating industry credibility for events over the last few years.
Facebook marketing campaigns and creative use of Facebook advertising have supplemented the more traditional forms of advertising with fantastic results, Facebook allows you to select your target audience, pre-schedule posts, boost posts at a cost – selected by yourself, and create engagement with followers.
Facebook pages with a substantial amount of followers give immediate industry credibility – sadly most event’s organisers don’t see the value in creating and maintaining these pages – although the reach and potential is immeasurable. I hope this changes in the foreseeable future – the sway of social media is powerful and far reaching.
Pre event Twitter polls that allow attendees to vote on subjects and topics that would interest them, is a great way of creating pre event hype. For example Tweetpoll and PollDaddy are great voting platforms – you can also run a Twitter competition for free event tickets for a certain amount of people who share content and get engaged prior to the event, helping to spread the word.
Encourage your speakers and presenters to fully maximize their social media following, by creating teaser videos and tweets, which can be pre-scheduled and then released across their various platforms encouraging people to interact and retweet to their followers.
Hashtags for the event are critical – and again encourage live interaction on the day. Many events have live Twitter Walls, where tweets are shown as they come in, displaying the event hashtag. To get your event trending with your hashtag, on the day, is a huge coup – make sure however the hashtag is easy to remember and not too long to type out, for example #FoodFest15 or #BizEx2016 would be great hashtags.
Incentives can be given out during the day for the most active Twitter users, and encouraging people to blog and post pictures to social media to win several small prizes
LinkedIn is also a great platform to promote a business related event, and include people in group discussions prior to the event, and Instagram is growing in popularity in leaps and bounds. Savvy users link all their social media platforms and release information to thousands of followers at the click of a button.
Do not underestimate social media for your next event. Have a look at our articles regarding creating Facebook and Twitter pages as well for more information on utilizing these platforms.
