Growing, designing and executing a successful event demands a large amount of experience and planning. Whether you’re developing a school event, corporate event, or starting a new product, social media is an effective, scalable way to generate interest and spread awareness before of your next event. The fact is, if you’re not utilising social media to advertise and sell your next event, you are missing out on one of the most efficient ways to create recognition and increase participation.
The best part about event promotion? The more original you are with your campaign, the less capital you will need to use on advertising it. Planning an event that creates interest and reaches the right target group naturally means you can enhance your limited marketing resources with an original campaign strategy.
While there are established techniques for selling an event, social media has shown itself to be an especially potent way to increase participation and foster engagement in the lead-up to an event. Whether you’re starting a national brand or preparing an event on-campus, learn these suggestions to increase your event participation with social media advertising.
- Create An Event on Facebook and Share It Extensively
Regardless of the kind of event you are selling or the target group that you want to reach, Facebook Events is one social media stage that you cannot afford to neglect.
Facebook events is the easiest and most powerful social media event advertising tool. FB Events allows you to increase awareness about your upcoming event and provide users with important information that they will need to interact with your event. According to Polite Promotions, social engagement is a powerful way to build legitimacy for your event.
The amount of news that users can discover from Facebook events pages is also important. Users can find the location, venue, start time, attendance cost, map, and get directions from the Facebook page. If you are selling tickets to your event or it requires enrolment, you can also have a CTA button that directs users towards the right webpage.
- Post Regularly About Updates and Developments
You’re passionate about your event, so, of course, you want to post as much as feasible, right? Well — not exactly.
There’s a fine line between advertising an event and barraging users with too many updates that they’re just not interested in hearing about. You want to concentrate on providing updates about your event and sharing it on various social media channels that are going to interest your fancied demographic. Aim for high-quality posts rather than frequent updates that don’t offer any real value to users.
Keep an eye on your social media posts and determine what is working and what isn’t. Make sure that engagement from posts remains steady and modify your posting frequency as needed. If you notice that engagement is dropping off, you need to adjust accordingly.
- Hashtags Provide Free, Organic Visibility
Social media hashtags increase awareness – so ensure that your event has a hashtag that people can use when they are posting about your event in the leadup to the day. Hashtags are big on Twitter and Instagram. Having a branded hashtag enables you to advertise your event for free. Once people start to partake and produce content with your event hashtag, you’ll be getting free publicity and creating interest without even raising a finger.
Don’t forget, when you are creating content before your event, ensure that you are using interest and reach oriented hashtag that can increase the appeal of your target demographic. Make sure that you are showing your event to users that you think may be involved in attending your event. There is no point in developing a geo-specific hashtag that is going to create interest from people who are not likely to partake in your event.
- Start Right Now
Don’t wait around – start promoting your event as soon as you can. As a precedent, consider the time and energy goes into promoting a film or a music concert before the tickets even go on sale. When you begin planning an event, you need to start creating excitement as soon as you can. Even if you still need to iron out the details, start getting the word out there as soon as possible so that you can gauge interest and create a buzz.
Post more news as it becomes accessible and as you confirm specifics in the leadup to your event can help to create excitement and action in the leadup to your event.
Final Thoughts
Social media is a highly-effective way to boost participation, spread information and create interest in the leadup to an event.
Want to know the best thing about using social media advertising for your event? Creativity can supplement a limited budget. The more creative and original you are with your marketing, the more likely that your event will go ‘viral’ and organically reach the right audience.
