Keep It Social: Marketing Your Events on Social Media
Social media should be a primary channel for your online marketing efforts. Whichever social network(s) you’ve decided to focus on with your branded content, it’s important to let followers know about your latest amazing event.
Your profiles will be a great way to send out regular updates and announcements and spread the word about your event. The key here is to find out where your target audience hangs out and reach out to them there. Putting on a tech seminar? Head to LinkedIn to target professionals. Hosting a niche food popup? Preview the goods with foodie pics on Instagram including popular hashtags.
There are a huge number of ways to utilise social media in promoting your event, from announcing special offers, to covering your event live on the day, you should consider your social strategy a key part of marketing your event from start to finish.
Get Started
There are infinite options of how to showcase your brand and event on social media. But be careful – it's easy to spread yourself too thin. Creating profiles on every social media platform you can think of quickly leads to being unable to maintain them. Be selective and choose the right platforms for you.
Facebook has historically been the main promotion channel for event organisers. This was likely your first port of call too; make sure you utilise the promotion aspects effectively and activate your audience. Share your event news, offers and other stories related to your event with your Facebook followers regularly. If you’ve set up a corresponding Facebook event page, add a ‘Get Tickets’ link to make it easy for attendees to find tickets for your event.
Twitter and Instagram are ideal for both pre-event promotion and 'live' on-the-day coverage. In the run up to your event, use relevant hashtags to increase the reach of your posts and spread the word. By using hashtags you increase your chances of exposure to new, relevant audiences. But be careful not to overdo it – be specific and limit it to three or four key tags. Share lineup news, announcements from your key speakers and other content in the run-up to keep fans engaged and build excitement.
Don't be shy about posting regularly, and, in some cases, sharing the same content multiple times to make the most of it. On platforms like Twitter – where your posts are included in a real-time feed – you should take into account that sharing at different times will catch your different followers depending on their habits. Here's a great graphic care of Buffer to illustrate how they share a new piece of content and ensure it gets a good airing online:
When sharing the same content multiple times, be creative about it's framing. Sharing exactly the same message can come off spammy and quickly annoy followers who see all of your posts. Choose different aspects of your event to highlight with each share. For example, focus a post on your headliners, but a separate message on the other acts on the bill. Here's a great example from Kissmetrics on how to come up with a variety of messages:
Sharing not only your own announcements, but also news from artists, speakers, venues and anyone else involved in your event is a great way to keep fans engaged. Track key accounts related to your event using Twitter lists, or listening tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to keep a feed of their updates handy. Use this feed as a content source and re-share the stories across your own profiles.
Mention or tag artists, speakers, and venues in your posts. More often than not, they'll be happy to re-share your content and event page, and in doing so increase the reach of your event!
Pro Tip
Use targeting tools to fine tune who sees your ads and promoted posts on Facebook and Twitter. The more specific you are, the more likely you will be to grab the attention of fans in your target demographic.
Get in touch with the Billetto Media team for advice and to coordinate coverage of your event and connect with Billetto's social profiles so we can re-share your news on our profiles!
Connect with Billetto
Learn More
