When it comes to event marketing, social media is a great tool to help increase awareness, excitement, and attendance for an event. The most popular app among U.S. smartphone audiences is Facebook with just over 80 percent user reach, which is one of the reasons why social media marketing has helped digital platforms nearly replace almost all forms of traditional marketing methods (i.e., print media, broadcast media, direct mail & telemarketing).
Out of all the digital marketing methods available today, social media has some of the highest engagement metrics and Facebook, in particular, leads the pack. With over 1.85 billion users and 8 billion daily video views, the ability to promote your event to interested parties is literally in the palm of your hand.
It is not that Facebook is the only social media game in town, but it does offer the most options for event marketers to reach out and create hype for their event. If done correctly, most social media platforms are great tools to help you create a lot of “buzz” for an event. One of the most effective methods by which to promote an event on social media is to combine multimedia and quotes to entice, engage, and captivate your audience. According to Buffer Social, an intuitive social media management platform, a few effective event marketing techniques to use on social media are: introducing the speaker lineup, using photo booths, and creating multimedia quotes.
3 Helpful Social Media Event Marketing Strategies
Not all social media platforms are the same, and there are many useful methods for touting an event that may work on one social media site but not on others. Since there are so many social media users, it may seem that promoting your event on social media would be rather easy, and for the most part it is. However, there are special techniques that, when used correctly, have the potential to increase registration rates by a measurable amount. Here are three of them:
Company Page: The best way to promote an event is not through your personal Facebook page or fan page but through a company page. Event marketers are more than likely already familiar with creating and promoting an event page for events, yet many of them fail to use a company page along with it. As an event page fails to provide any relevance after the event has taken place, a company page stays relevant forever, or at least as long as the company is active. That is why creating a company page and promoting an event on it not only brings brand awareness for the company but encourages sign-ups for the recent event and other events that will take place in the future. Consider incorporating your company’s website by adding a page where potential event-goers can get the general event info, but also absorb the feel and branding of your company.
Paid Ads: No event marketing strategy would be complete without using some form of paid advertising. Facebook is one of the best social media network to utilize for paid ads. The company’s advertising platform allows event marketers to perform a multitude of tasks to bring awareness and promote registration for an event – tasks that other social media platforms cannot provide at all or at the same level. These include driving traffic to a website (registration page), targeting specific people (subscribers and competitor audiences), and targeting particular actions (people who have attended similar events in the past), to name a few.
Multi-Channel Promotion: Success in online event marketing really comes down to using as many resources as possible in order to reach as many interested parties as possible. It is not advisable to use just one social media account but several in order to maximize reach, and therefore results. Cross-promoting on all your social media accounts is an effective strategy to use along with the two that were just listed above and the social platform they were used on. If done correctly, you should have no problem getting people to sign up for your next event!
Conclusion
Almost all social media platforms have a proven track record with event marketers, and that’s why they keep coming back to them again and again for each successive event. The strategies listed in this article give social media marketers effective techniques that can be used before, during, and after events to increase registration, information, and attendance for current and future company events.
References: Medium Podium Buffer Social The Bizzabo Blog
