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How to promote an event using social media

Holding an event? Wondering how to best promote it? There is certainly one thing you that cannot afford to ignore – Social media. Social media is an amazingly powerful tool to promote your events. It can be used to increase registration, increase buzz, and ultimately increase attendance. It enables you to reach a wide audience. It also enables invitees to connect with each other and share information.

However, remember social media is a channel, not a strategy. The optimum way of utilising this medium will depend on your target audience and how they interact online. So chose your platforms carefully and ensure it matches these needs. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are often very good options for most.

How can you use social media for your event?

Promote your registration page on the wall on your fan page. If you provide great content, you can promote the direct link to your event intermittently.
Create a Facebook event. This should contain all the lowdown on the event. The page means you can easily invite your fans and make it easy for them to share with their friends. You can create a Facebook Event from your fan Page for any business-related events. Alternatively, creating an Event from your personal profile enables you to message all invitees directly into their inbox.
Generate traffic to your event pages by hosting giveaways for individuals who use the pages to register their attendance. Offer larger giveaways to attendees who post links to the event page.
Create a dedicated Facebook page for larger events. Exploit this opportunity fully by getting attendees involved in the event by asking them questions that influence the content/ agenda for the event.
Have your own event sales/registration page outside of your social media pages.
Add social share buttons to your event registration page including TweetMeme Retweet Button, Facebook Like Button and LinkedIn Share Button. This will increase your popularity perception, encouraging others to share. Capitalise on this by positioning your social share buttons at the top right “above the fold”.
Use location-based services such as Foursquare.
Offer live micro events on your fan Page. Your Facebook fans will relish the opportunity to interact with you live. You can use this engagement as an outlet to add value and to seed your upcoming event.
Encourage your attendees to engage with each other and share with others once they have signed up for an event. e.g. encourage them to write on your Facebook event wall and engage through other social channels.
Use images and video to entice, such as photos or videos of previous events.
Record and post record of events via Facebook, blogs, video, and photo sharing.

Useful tools to help you manage your event

Plancast - lets you know about the events your friends plan to attend as well as other cool events coming up in your area.

Yahoo - Upcoming Yahoo, great for adding your event for people looking for local events and get more exposure

Lanyrd - Great site that has some cool features including: see what events your friends are attending or even speaking at. Find conferences near you. Track what’s going on during the conference, even if you aren’t there including who is tweeting what. If you’ve missed out on a event you can easily catch up on slides, video or podcasts.

TweetBubbles is a tool which can make your presentation more exciting by live feeding Twitter during events or seminars. If you use TweetBubbles, opinions and questions posted by the participants of the events will be over-layed on top of the presentation as tweets in bubbles.

Twittercamp is a desktop app (Mac and PC) that runs in Adobe Air and displays in near real time the incoming tweets for a specific account. It is elegant, and very suitable for setting up as self-running apps on big shiny plasma screens at conferences.

Pathable is an online community and social network that helps your attendees meet, connect and stay in touch – before, during and after your event.

Thrillcall Nucleus is a social media marketing tool that enables bands, venues, and live music promoters to create events and publish content all in one place.

Eventbrite is a simple and popular powerful tool to manage, promote and sell your event. Promotes your events on Facebook too

Bizzabo is still in it’s launch stages. It’s a free location based mobile app for networking at business events. Bizzabo lets you know exactly who the professional attendees are and allows you to get in touch with them.

Are you organising your events via social media? What tools have you used and had the best results from?

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Lilach

Founder at Socialable Ltd

Lilach Bullock is passionate about getting tangible results using social media. Listed in Forbes as one of the top 20 women social media power influencers. She's the co-author of "Images that Influence" (Number One in its category on Amazon). Lilach is consulted by journalists and regularly quoted in newspapers on social media related matters, including (Forbes, Social Media Today, Prima Magazine, The Sunday Times and BBC Radio 5 Live ). A keynote speaker at business and marketing seminars. If you want excellent results, more business and better visibility you can can subscribe to Socialable newsletter here.

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