Some people love social media and for some, it’s a sore subject. No matter how you feel on the topic, though, one thing is for sure—using social media to promote events is important if you want to drive great attendance numbers and sell tickets online. It’s the single easiest and most cost-effective way to get your message out, reach the masses, and scale appropriately within your budget constraints.
And while more is always best, it’s easy to get lost in the passel of different social media platforms and the need for different strategies for each. What we recommend when using social media to promote events is to focus on the core four—Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
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How to Promote an Event on Facebook
Facebook is a pretty unique social media platform that offers both free and paid options for promoting your event. When leveraged properly, you can increase awareness, drive ticket sales, and even connect with vendors or other groups that might want to partner up.
Tips for Success Using Facebook to Promote Your Event:
- Less is more. It can be tempting to create a massive wall of text about your event, but that tends to turn people off. Have a few small paragraphs at most (1-2 sentences per paragraph), and utilize short bullet points when you can.
- Always have a great picture and a link to accompany your post.
- It’s smart to put out several posts about your event, but make sure not to overwhelm and spam your followers. Too much of a good thing can work in reverse.
- Create a sense of urgency. Pointing out things like limited tickets, closing registration, or rising prices are great ways to drive signups and purchases (as long as you have a way to capture those which we cover later in the guide).
- Promoting a post instead of running an ad is a creative way to circumvent the character limitations with ads (if that’s something you need).
- Add your event to the sidebar of your business page
- Categorize your event properly
- Use a custom hashtag
How to Promote an Event on Instagram
Instagram is an image-heavy social media platform that is great to connect with users of all ages. What’s neat about the platform is that it’s really set up to work with any and all types of events, unlike something like LinkedIn that may be more limited to professional-type events.
Tips for Success Using Instagram to Promote Your Event:
- Pictures, pictures, pictures. People flock to Instagram for the imagery. If you’re not properly leveraging that in your ads and posts, you’re not going to have much success. If you need to pay a few dollars to get some professional images made, it could be a wise investment.
- Consider connecting with influencers. Whether through paid promotion, bargaining, or just goodwill, you may be able to get Instagram users with a lot of followers to help you promote your event.
- Paid Instagram marketing is run through and paired with Facebook. If you’re looking to use social media to promote your events and have limited time, that’s a way to cross off two of the largest platforms in one fell swoop.
How to Promote an Event on LinkedIn
Most people think of LinkedIn as a resume-style, business-focused platform. In fact, if you asked most people if they considered LinkedIn social media, they’d say no. However, the platform has made major strides over the past few years to be more interactive and give users (and event planners like you) better ways to connect.
Tips for Success Using LinkedIn to Promote Your Event:
- Gauge the appropriateness of your event. If it’s not something that fits well in a professional environment, it might be better to focus your efforts on other social media platforms.
- Craft your message to appeal to the userbase. For example, if you’re promoting a fundraiser on other social media channels, you might push more of the fun aspects. However, if you’re promoting it on LinkedIn, you could see benefits from mixing in subtle nods to potential networking opportunities.
How to Promote an Event on Twitter
Brevity is the soul of wit, right? Twitter is a fast-paced social media platform that gives you a limited 160 characters to get your message across to potential event attendees. And while this might seem like a drawback, it’s actually a great exercise in helping you dial down your core message for more effective results. Additionally, Twitter has a lot of backend technology that can help you through both free and paid avenues to get your message out.
Tips for Success Using Twitter to Promote Your Event:
- Your goal with Twitter marketing should be to inspire the people that see your message to click on a link for more information.
- When crafting your message, focus more on the benefits and less on the details. Instead of using your character space to give all the nitty-gritty details, talk more about the exciting aspects of the event. You can include all of the additional details on the event page through the link.
- Utilize hashtags. These are a great way to get people who don’t follow you to see your message.
- Reach out to people who are involved in your event and ask for a retweet. The more eyes you can get on your message about your event, the better.
The Next Step
It’s never too early to start building your social media audience. The larger you can build your audience, the less you need to spend to reach more people. Effectively using social media to promote events generally involves a mix of free and paid campaigns. The larger you can drive your audience size (which does take time), the fewer financial resources you need to put towards the paid side of the house.
But the most important part of using social media to promote events is to have somewhere effective to drive the traffic. If you successfully get someone interested in the event but you have no way of giving them more information or selling a ticket on the spot (online), you may miss out on getting them to attend.
A great way to solve all of these issues under one roof is with Event Espresso. The user-friendly full event management program lets you easily create full event listings with all the details and even sell tickets and take registrations right on the spot! It’s the greatest way to get your message out and capitalize on your social media promotion efforts.
And the best part? You don’t need a degree in computer science to use Event Espresso. It’s extremely intuitive, takes only a few minutes to set up, and comes with the best support staff in the business. If you’re ready to take your event to the next level and ensure you capitalize on your marketing efforts, it’s time to check out what Event Espresso can do for you.