Towson University’s Outreach Blog

Jenn

1. Create a Facebook event page
A Facebook event page allows you to publish essential information about your event (time, location, etc.), and track who will be attending. This is a great place to post relevant articles and resources that will further engage the audience. It also gives the audience a place to make comments on the event and share the event with their Facebook friends. The sharing feature is essential because it allows your event to reach more potential attendees.

2. Connect with Guest Speakers or Event Sponsors
If your event features a notable guest speaker, be sure to mention him/her on social media. For example, you can mention the individual on Twitter or tag them on Facebook. You can also mention sponsors in the same way. Mentioning a notable speaker or sponsor on social media will associate them with your event, thus creating increased awareness and credibility. Blogs are also a great place to connect with guest speakers. For example, you can have a guest speaker do a guest blog post about your event.

3. Publish Event Updates on Social media
Social media can also be used to keep your audience up to date as the event approaches. For example, you may want to let your audience know about agenda changes, new sponsors, new speakers, or new attractions. You can also use social media to countdown to the event, and to let your audience know when the event is close to selling out.

4. Publicize Social Media URLs
Be sure to include Facebook, Twitter, and Blog URLs on all websites and/or print collateral that are used to market the event. This should result in increased traffic to your social media websites since the consistent appearance of social media icons and URL’s will remind the audience to connect with your event.  Be sure to create a hashtag and let your audience know about it through your marketing efforts. Hashtags allow the audience to follow conversations about your event if they search the hashtag on Twitter.

5. Use Social Media for Crowd Sourcing
You can also use Facebook, Twitter, and blogs to interact with the audience. For example, you can poll the audience by asking what they’d like to see at the event. This will allow you to hear the voice of your audience and to ultimately present content that is relevant to your audience, creating greater satisfaction with the event.

Check out how DECO is using social media!

Image Credit: fotographic1980

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 13th, 2011 at 2:33 pm and is filed under Events, Marketing, Small Business Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.