I have several clients and handfuls of friends for whom marketing events is a big part of their business and brand. A few of my clients actually run businesses that specialize in events, and many of my clients are indie authors who need people to show up at their book launches and bookstore readings.
I also have one tech client—Eventbrite—that hires me to ghostwrite blog posts for event organizers, and for them, I do a lot of research. Which is how I occasionally come across tidbits of information I can’t help but share with my other clients.
Today I read an article on Certain.com (an enterprise event automation platform—try not to fall asleep) called “How Proactive Social Media Outreach Gets People to Your Events.” The most noteworthy piece of information I took away from this article isn’t how to market on social media, but why. Most of us think, we have to market on social media because it’s there and people expect it. And that’s true. But there is another, far more compelling reason to market your event on social media:
Because people want to know who else is going.
We choose events—festivals, conferences, book clubs—based on the company. And social media is the best place to incite some good healthy FOMO (fear o’ missing out, if you’re not a millennial). Although there’s a place for email marketing and paper flyers, if you want to drum up some real hype, you gotta get on social.
Certain.com has some great insight and tools to offer in this regard. It’s a long-ish article, and much of it applies only to big brands that use content management systems, so I’ll summarize for the rest of you here (and hopefully not get sued):
1 Choose Your Guests Wisely
If you are hosting an event that will have speakers, sponsors, or guests, choose ones considered thought leaders in their field—on social. A well-known speaker is a good investment. A well-known speaker who will definitely tweet, chat, and share about your event is priceless. If you’re trying to decide between two special guests, always choose the one who is good at social. This dramatically widens your audience and helps you build credibility. (Certain.com has some great tips for charming your potential guest into coming on board, if you want to read more about it.)
2 Make it Freaking Obvious
Anywhere you exist on the web, you should have links to ALL your social media platforms. We’re talking super obvious icons on your home page, blog posts that are easy to share, email messaging that includes links to your profiles, etc. This seems like no duh. Yet it’s frighteningly common that people do not do this. If I have to look for your Facebook page for more than one second, forget it.
3 Provide Stuff to Share
Provide your guests, speakers, sponsors, etc. with shareable assets: prewritten social media updates you can suggest to them, blog posts or prompts for posts, images advertising the event, your logo, and insider information they might want to share with their audiences.
4 #Hashtagit
Customize your own short and sweet hashtag for each event. That way, attendees can talk about it collectively. Eventbrite has a great article about this. Sadly, I did not write this one.
5 Target Your Ads
If you’re willing to spend a little bit of money on targeted social ads (like on Facebook, for instance), target the ads to your “influencer’s followers.” Facebook, the insidious bastard, makes this very easy to do, and not very expensive, as far as advertising goes.
. . . . .
All of this stuff aside, I’m a writer, so to me, the words you use are more important than anything else, of course—and that they are correctly spelled and punctuated.
I don’t handle social media marketing for most of my clients, partly because I believe that social media is only done well if it’s done by YOU. But I write website copy, blog posts, articles, white papers, and things like that. And I also edit books, of course. So contact me if you need any of those things!
