This week we’ll be taking a deep dive into using Twitter marketing to build awareness around your events. I’ll try to cover everything related to Twitter marketing and how to employ it as a tool for event marketing. I’ve included a lot of information in this post, so if you already know about Twitter, or don’t care about seeing Twitter stats, please feel free to skip ahead. I’ve outlined the topics for you below.
Whether you plan events year round, or once a year, promoting your event is essential to it’s success. The advances in social media marketing (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) alone have changed the structure of event planning and promotion in unimaginable ways over the last decade. In 2016 there were some 195.7 million social network users in the U.S., the equivalent of about three quarters of the country’s population. According to estimates, the number of worldwide social media users reached 1.96 billion and is expected to grow to some 2.5 billion by 2018. On average, global internet users spend around 118 minutes per day surfing social networks.
2016 Social Media Stats
By Garth Koyle
Networking with other like-minded people and organizations can make a significant impact on your success as an event manager, website programmer, or designer. If you haven’t already discovered that, then you will soon! We know it’s important, so we’ve created several ways to help you engage with other members of the Event Espresso community:
Here are some of the key benefits and reasons to network with other Event Espresso users:
Building a relationship is about more than just connecting to someone else’s online profile. You might have 500+ friends on Facebook or the same number of connections on Linkedin, but do you connect with those people on a daily basis about how to grow your business? Quit “liking” or “poking” old friends; connect with the people and organizations who are working on the same projects and have the same goals as you do. That’s a real business relationship.
Do you want to know how Event Espresso users can process 80,000 registrations in a single month or $35,000 in 48 hours? You’re not going to find that by watching your news feed on Facebook. You’ll learn more important ways on how make your events more successful by engaging with the Event Espresso community than any other source. Do you want your friends to “like” you, or do you want your customers to like you (for example, by attending your events)?
You might have a thousand points of expertise on your Linkedin profile and your resume might be three pages long, but those aren’t any good to the wrong audience. You’re using Event Espresso and your business is similar to hundreds of other businesses. The Event Espresso community will value your experience and skills the most. Join the discussion and build your own brand today.
Event Espresso probably has more features than your local coffee shop has flavors. But imagine how many combinations you can create with all the coffee flavors or Event Espresso features? Building Event Espresso as a plugin for WordPress also allows you to use a variety of other plugins and themes, but which ones do other people use? There is a wealth of information available among the thousands of Event Espresso users, we just need to ask the right questions and encourage each other to share the right answers. What questions do you have and what insight can you give? What would you like to learn more about?
Organizing, managing and promoting events is an ever-changing job and there might be a thousand different ways to do something. But if you had the chance to ask someone else who has been there, would you take the opportunity? You might be surprised at what other people know and how it can expand your knowledge. We also can’t read your mind about what you want to know, so the only way for anyone to help you is to ask.
At Event Espresso we ask a lot of questions each day. We ask each person of the team questions about technical issues or how we can better serve our customers; we ask customers each day about how they use Event Espresso and how we can improve our events plugin; and we ask third-party developers and mentors how to deal with the challenges of growing a small business. But no matter who we ask for help, we always get the best answers from people who have walked down that path before. Our mission is to help you grow your business, and as you grow you’ll be faced with many different challenges. You should have a team in your corner who can look at the problem from outside the fight and give you advice on what your next steps could be.
One of the most challenging and rewarding things you can do is help someone else be more successful. It takes a lot of courage to give your opinion that might not be accepted, but if you have real-life experience then no one else can refute your knowledge. Your simple opinion is also helpful for others who are uncertain about what path they should take. In nearly every case your participation and encouragement can help other people be more successful.
How did you learn about Event Espresso? You might have had to search for an online event registration plugin for WordPress, or you might have been one of the lucky ones and had a friend recommend it to you and saved you from all the searching costs. Either way, by connecting with other Event Espresso users you will have access to other event organizers who know how to solve your same problem. For example, what website hosting company should you use with Event Espresso or trust?; what merchant account do people like best and is most affordable?; what is a good WordPress theme, etc? Event Espresso will be your best resource for answers to these and many other questions.
When was the last time your old high school friend on Facebook was able to help you earn business from a new client? Is your Linkedin profile among the top 10% most-viewed profiles? We know that neither of those relationships or statistics are as productive in generating new business than networking with like-minded businesses and potential customers.
It really is hard to find good help these days. We’re creating new ways for you to find help from other Event Espresso users, programmers, designers, marketers, etc. who can help you make your events more successful. Need to hire someone? We have a Job Board where you can post free (and paid) job listings, and we try to tweet out all the job postings to our extended network for you. We also know that the best place to find good help to manage your online event registration is by building relationships with other people who are doing the same.
Event Espresso was started after Garth and Seth worked together for three years. They’ve enjoyed working together, and their work has become their hobby. Some of their best friends are now people they work with. They enjoy networking with customers, programmers, business managers, etc. Hopefully you get to do what you enjoy – we enjoy having you part of the Event Espresso community.
Again, at Event Espresso we know that if you meaningfully engage with on other like-minded people and businesses to achieve your goals, you can learn who to trust and how to do things better. Participate with us in the community today via:
What can you bring to the Event Espresso community and what can we all help you with?
Social Media Buttons
Now includes Facebook and Twitter share buttons.
Among several minor bug fixes etc, we have included a simple social media plugin/addon that can be used to display Twitter and Facebook buttons in your Event Espresso templates. If you have relocated your template files to your uploads folder, you will need to make these changes to your template files.
I have also provided templates for the payment and return to payment pages.
Calendar Week View
The calendar has also been updated to include weekly and daily agenda views and a settings page to manage the calendar options.
Here is a list of recent changes between the last four versions.
Changes:
3.0.16
Added simple buttons for Twitter and Facebook. Templates have been updated to include these changes.
Added payment and return to payment templates.
Added required text to form fields.
Added a new function to Get a single start or end time:
* function event_espresso_get_time($event_id, $format = ‘start_time’)
* @params $event_id (required)
* @params $time (optional, start_time (default) | end_time)
Changed the plugin to use the built in jQuery library, instead of the Google jQuery API.
Adjusted the questions display query to order by group order. This will work if the users do use the group_order field. Otherwise the questions will get mixed up.
Added the search and replace values to the invoice email
3.0.15
Moved the system questions and question groups function into the database install scipt. Hopefully this will fix the problem with the system questions and groups not getting installed.
3.0.14
Applied some formatting to the category name in the category listing.
Removed the wpautop function from the category editor.
Added the end_date of an event to the event_list.php.
Fixed the following issues
1) Edited questions always defaulting to ‘required’.
2) Deleting of questions and groups via checkbox.
The Event Espresso team is excited to be a part of WordCamp Las Vegas 2010 (follow on Twitter: @lvwordcamp #wclv,). This will be our second WordCamp sponsorship after we sponsored WordCamp Utah, right here in our hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah. We enjoyed networking with everyone at WordCamp Utah so much, that we decided to do it again in Vegas.
Be sure to follow us on Twitter or join our WordCamp Las Vegas Twitter list of attendees and be online during the event. One special Twitter follower will walk away with a free download of Event Espresso to use on their site (or a clients) WordPress installation.
Can’t wait until WCLV for a chance to get your hands on the premium version of the plugin for free? Use the coupon code LVWORDCAMP to get $20 off! Hurry the code is limited to the first 10 uses.