Using Social Media to Promote Events

I went to a new Extension Faculty training earlier this week and heard tidbits of ideas for programs and events that they want to take back to their county residents. They all seemed so passionate about their specializations and the impact they can make on their communities. So naturally, to kill their morale, I came in with the question, "How will you get people to show up?"

Aaaaaand crickets.

They just didn't know. So I came up with a quick list of how they could promote their programs and events using social media. Here's the list I shared with them:

1. Create a Facebook Event - You can share posts, upload photos, invite guests and edit event details. Select the people you want to invite for that event and ask them to share it on their pages. Add a cover photo to make the Event page look more colorful and visually appealing. And finally, pin the event to the top of your Facebook Page!

2. Choose a Hashtag - Do your research to make sure it isn’t used for anything else with hashtags.org. *Keep it simple and consistent* and use across your social networks - refer to it on printed materials!
Use related hashtags for market/industry, but don’t use too many hashtags each post.

3. Go Visual - Generate buzz by hinting at the headline act with a video, featuring the keynote or demonstrating a new product (people love Vine and Instagram videos!). Create event-specific Pinterest boards that tell exciting, visual stories about past events and what attendees can look forward to seeing at the next one.

4. Hold a Contest - Contests help boost exposure and get the buzz going, as well as establishes the event hashtag for everyone to follow. You can promote the campaign to your newsletter/email list and create a sense of urgency with the announcement of the tickets going on sale (or prices going up). You can post it on your social feeds, or cover it in your blog. If you have some influencers and champions (read: colleagues and sponsors) helping you promote the event through their social channels, offer them a giveaway or have them promote your giveaway.

5. Offer a Sneak Peek - I love sneak peeks! Give potential attendees real-time access to keynote speakers, panelists and other experts who will be at the event. If you have resources to spare, host a Google hangout or a Twitter chat (or a whole series of them) to give attendees an idea of who will be at the event and what they’ll learn!

6. Do a Countdown - This isn’t a simple ‘Five days until the event’ status on Facebook. You HAVE to make it visual and graphically appealing. But don’t overdo it – start a couple weeks out, then every few days, then every other day until five days out and then every day. Why? It gets massive involvement and keeps the event at the front of people’s minds without spamming them with the same event details!

7. Encourage Check-ins - Tell people to share your event on their social networks by “checking in” (Facebook, Foursquare).

8. Thank people Socially - Thank sponsors, people on your networks and email lists for attending. This adds an intangible touch that adds to their overall experience!

The biggest takeaway here is that there will never be a "One Size Fits All" for marketing events/programs on social media. These suggestions may not be applicable to your event due to size, timing, platforms you're using, etc. But! You can still be a rockstar... you just have to be strategic about it!

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Direction of Communication and Scope

Direction of Communication

In discussing the aspect of direction of communication, classic marketing is unidirectional. This means information and brand awareness is spread actively from the company to a passive audience. I would say classic marketing was appropriate when the messages highlighted the most commonly demanded goods to the largest common denominator of consumers via mass media like TV, radio, newspaper, and billboards. Marketers targeted specific demographics and reached a large audience in doing so. To rely solely on unidirectional marketing in this day and age, though, would be a marketing fail.

 

On the other hand, the new, social way of marketing can expect the best benefits of promotion and exchange of dialogue. Both the company and customers actively talk and listen to one another. There is a plethora of pros to social marketing, but here are two I deem most important:

1. It's where the brand's consumers are - the average person spends at least 23 minutes per day on Facebook, giving the brand optimized ad placement based on their preferences and psychographics.

2. Social media presents an opportunity for a degree of personalization, thus creating involvement and relevance, not just awareness (See Mass Marketing vs. Personalization infographic here on Social Media Today).

 

 

Campaigns have proven to be more effective when they include multimedia and multi-channels. With participatory channels, influence becomes more powerful than reach (Young, 2010). Classic marketing is better than social when traditional marketing channels are able to create especially memorable and emotional occasions with a brand and integrate tools of social media to create dialogue. This works well because it has the potential to lead to viral marketing. Direction of communication refers to social marketing channels like Facebook and Twitter where consumers spend most of their time and are prone to sharing "likes" of particular brands, organizations, and customer service experiences with their network of friends and fans. 

 

Scope

Classic marketing and social media marketing both want to gain market share for a product or service. The classic approach is smaller in scope, only because the bigger the audience you want to reach, the more it costs. Classic marketing allows for delivering to large audiences, measured by demographics that advertisers bought. This is noted with the product or service sale, but engagement ends there. In this way, I believe classic to be better than social.

 

Social is accessible by anyone regardless of their location. The downfall is you lose targeting. According to the reading from Mitch Joel's The World is Changing has Changed, the average post from a Facebook brand page only reaches 16% of its fans. So trying to reach a certain demographic may prove to be difficult.

 

A social media marketing campaign can be just as successful as its classic counterpart if it has knowledge of demographics from their users. Without it, there's only opportunity for the brand to target by content behavior and response (Young, 2010). Social marketing allows for more interaction with the brand since the consumer is digitally-enabled and connected. The consumers' appetite for information and entertainment grows exponentially, as the focus now shifts from markets and products to the brand's customers, their relationships and interaction over time. Although sharing an opinion of the product or service becomes as easy as a like or re-tweet button, the social model demands much more than what's normally included in marketing.

 

A brand's marketing campaign will retain its competitive edge by raising awareness via classic marketing and then engaging their audience through their social media platforms.

 

Source:

Bennett, S. (2013, December 1). Facebook Vs Twitter: Revenue, Users, Average Time Spent, Key Mobile Data [STATS]. - AllTwitter.
http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/facebook-vs-twitter-data-stats_b51335

Jones, M. (2013, May 13). Mass Marketing vs One-to-One Personalization [INFOGRAPHIC]. RSS.
http://socialmediatoday.com/martinjones/1452891/mass-marketing-vs-one-one-personalization-infographic

Stone, J. J. (2014, February 26). Social Media vs. Classic Marketing - We teach you how to start your own business in 60 days. We teach you how to start your own business in 60 days.
http://60daymba.com/social-media-vs-classic-marketing/

Young, A. (2010). Brand Media Strategy: Integrated Communications Planning in the Digital Era. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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