An Event Promotion Strategy

Very recently I deliv­ered 3 work­shops on social net­work­ing sites for busi­ness, we cov­ered LinkedIn, Face­book and Twit­ter. Although the feed­back of the work­shops were mainly pos­i­tive, I had hoped for a larger turn out. One of the prob­lems was that it was at very short notice which is why I think the organ­iser strug­gled this time round. How­ever this got me think­ing about how you should go about pro­mot­ing an event using social media to get the num­bers in fast.

There are two big rea­sons why peo­ple don’t show up to your event, firstly they’re not inter­ested or sec­ondly they don’t know about your event.

A few key points:

• If you cre­ate an event that peo­ple REALLY want to attend, it becomes much eas­ier to sell advance sale tick­ets and pack your event.
• Remem­ber to use the social media chan­nel most con­ducive to your audi­ence whether it be Face­book, Twit­ter, Linkedin or Some other chan­nel. Each tar­get mar­ket is a lit­tle different.
• The most suc­cess­ful event mar­keters lever­age social media as a lis­ten­ing platform. If you lis­ten to your tar­get mar­ket, you’re bet­ter apt to serve them.
• Get Feed­back and ask ques­tions like “How can we improve the event?” or “What didn’t you like about the event?”
• Never assume you know bet­ter than your event prospects or atten­dees. When in doubt, ask them what they want!

Here are some tools you may want to use as part of your campaign.

• meetup.com (Just plain cool with good inte­gra­tion with social sites)
• eventbrite.com (Good sys­tem for buy­ing tickets)
• LinkedIn (Don’t for­get the events space)
• Face­book (FB also has a space to cre­ate events)
• Twit­ter — Get a crowed sourced fast with this
• Email Newslet­ter
• Blog Arti­cles

Just use what is at your dis­posal, of course don’t for­get the tra­di­tional phon­ing around peo­ple if you think your audi­ence need a bit more convincing.

Let’s hope we have bet­ter luck next time.