How to Promote Your Event with Social Media

30 Jun How to Promote Your Event with Social Media

By Sabrina Bruning

Social media allows greater visibility to people we may not already have direct contact with. In addition, it provides us greater context on the individual(s) in question before initial contact is even made. Share a common interest? Possess a mutual friend? Fantastic, now you’re cooking with fire!

Here are several scenarios of how event promotion and social media compliment one another.

Look ma, no hands!
Imagine your event is a bicycle. Social media channels act as the wheels to carry you to where you are going. The more you leverage said channels, such as Plancast, the faster you are peddling. Kick your promotional campaign into a higher gear by providing as thorough information as possible. This doesn’t mean listing everything. Only display the most essential event details. Many companies attempt to use Plancast or Facebook event detail pages as a way of marketing their company. Let your event speak on behalf of your company, not the invite.

Set ‘em up, knock ‘em down!
Imagine your next event is a set of bowling pins. Promotion of your event through social media is the bowling ball and the lane represents how much time you have to market and promote your event. The more lane you give yourself, the more time you are granting yourself the ability to “course correct” during your promotional efforts. Facebook isn’t getting your event the traction you need? Start utilizing social media dashboards like Hootsuite or Seesmic to schedule tweets and draw on analytics to track the visibility and affect of your campaign. Look at click-through rates and the amount of retweets your campaign has received. You can also use bit.ly to collect and track this information as well. When you give yourself plenty of lane to roll down, you’re giving yourself the time to save your event promotion strategy from potentially tumbling into the gutter.

You Can’t Cook a Turkey in a Toaster…
Imagine your event is a dinner you are cooking. The cuisine presented on the table directly represents the quality of the individual(s) or company(ies ) attending your event. Not having quality guests for your event is like trying to cook gourmet food while armed with only a toaster. Obtaining a sufficient amount of quality guests [be it speakers, companies present or presenting, etc] is like cooking a turkey — it takes time but is always worth the wait when done properly — and you can’t cook a turkey in a toaster.

Building key relationships vital to any good event truly is like eating a meal. If your event is the food, then building your personal network is the silverware drawer: Do you need a spoon, a fork, or a knife to get the job done? When warming the pot for initiating a connection with a new contact is email, Facebook, Twitter, or a combination the best set of utensils?

So fire up your social networking grill, pull out a chair, say hello to the person sitting next to you and bon appétit!

Contributed Post: Sabrina Bruning, the Director of Events for Women 2.0.
She tweets/blogs about women in startups and San Francisco tech based events.