Welcome to the event manager blog series. Our goal is to share our expertise planning and hosting events to hopefully make your job a little easier. In prior months, we discussed using email marketing techniques and tips that will boost your event attendance. We also talked about how you can use Facebook for marketing your event – without paying for ads. Email and Facebook are your most powerful tools to generate excitement and successfully promote your event. In this entry though, we are going to be talking about our favourite network, Twitter, and how great it is for event marketing. Twitter’s focus on short messages, videos and stories keep people engaged, informed, and above all, inspired to be part of your events! It also is one of the least invasive ways to monitor what your community is saying about the issues you are experts in and opens a door into discussions that may involve your strategic, long-term priorities.
That being said, Twitter happens to be a network that is very easy to use, but very difficult to master. When it comes to using Twitter to promote an event, we find that it is the social network most event managers seem to have the hardest time with. You have probably seen events trending on Twitter recently, but have you ever asked yourself how they got there? Let’s take a look at some strategies and techniques that will help you promote and host an awesome event using Twitter.
Create A Riveting Hashtag
I am sure anyone reading this is already familiar with hashtags and how to use them naturally in your tweets, but for the purpose of promoting your event on Twitter, it’s a good idea to create a hashtag that is unique to you as well as your event. Using this strategy will help you reach out to your support base, let people share your event to a wider audience, and help you quickly respond to audience’s questions and comments. After all, there is enough research out there that shows that tweets using hashtags get retweeted more often than tweets without them. Make sure that you include your hashtag on event descriptions, on the ticket itself, on your signs on-site and email reminders.
Give Your Tweets Informative and Emotional Angles
See how we told you how hard Twitter is to master? In just 280 characters, your tweets must provide value to the reader, but also evoke emotions. It is best to tweet something short and eye-catching and include a link that people can go to for more information. Different people like a variety of things, so don’t forget to write about all aspects of the event. One tweet might explain the charity or your cause, one might explain the official message of the event, while another might go into detail about your speakers, the talent and entertainment, any politician’s or celebrities who might be attending or the DJ. You can also showcase the venue with a series of photographs, or the catering. You can definitely create tweets about all the different event elements that are happening.
Tweet Often About Your Event and Interact With Followers
For Twitter, because it is only a moment in time and nothing is pushed to a users inbox, you can tweet as often as you can, without coming across as too self-aggrandizing, or pushy, or spammy. A good way to accomplish this is to set up a schedule of tweets leading up to the event, one for every event element. Things such as venue information, the event theme, any attendees or speakers, media coverage, as well as recognizing your sponsors and affiliates. Being consistent with your event hashtag will also be helpful for people who are building a story about your event.
Make sure you respond to messages and thank users for mentions and retweets. You should also retweet any content about your event by sponsors and affiliates, attendees and the media. Doing this will help spread the word about your event.
Create And Share Visual Content
Photos and look really great on Twitter and really stand out among the other tweets in a users feed. Make sure that you are posting photos of the event so followers can get a visual of the event. You can also create a short promotional video about your event and post it on Twitter. This can be something as simple as a slideshow of photos about your event while adding text to provide some details. Also, during the event, change the cover photo of your Twitter account page, as well as the thumbnail, to images that are relevant to your event.
Run A Twitter Contest
Setting up a Twitter contest is a perfect way to increase your reach and have your followers engage with or retweet your content. The most common Twitter contest is a “retweet to win” contest. This is where you would ask users to follow your account, retweet a specific post and also mention your Twitter username and use your event hashtag.
Schedule Tweets In Advance For The Day Of The Event
You can use a tool like Buffer to schedule tweets leading up to the day of the event, as well as the day of the event. As you already know some of the elements of the event happening on the day of, and given you will be busy enough making sure that everything is running smoothly, you can generate a series of tweets in advance that can be posted throughout the day. Once you have these messages scheduled, you can supplement those ongoing messages yourself on-site at the event. You can tweet pictures of people who are there, engage with the other guests, retweet and mention other people or other tweets on the fly based on the activity and things you see at the event. It is very important that you have some activity on Twitter as the event is ongoing.
Assign A Member Of Your Team To Live Tweet During The Event
When you are at an event, there are many things that you can do to get the word out and share what is going on. One thing you can do is live-tweet. To do this properly, it is best you assign a member of your team this responsibility otherwise you run the risk of overlap or duplication. The assigned live-tweeter must listen to the guest speaker, pick up on the important points they are articulating and share them concisely on Twitter. If your event does not have any speakers, you can still tweet throughout the day. You can tweet about the event setup, things that are happening that you think your followers might be interested in knowing about.
Thank Everyone For Their Participation After The Event
After your event is over, don’t forget to thank everyone for attending. Pay special attention to your sponsors and affiliates, and mention any speakers or key influencers that were in attendance. If you were fund-raising or working towards any specific goal, make mention of the event’s performance and put emphasis on how the attendees’ participation made a real impact. You can also share some photos or video testimonials after the event, links to other social media you are active on. Finally, check your insights to make sure there are any statistics for future postings that may help you with your promotion.
Final Thoughts
Like most other social networks, the more you put into Twitter, the more you will get out of it. When Twitter is used wisely, it can be an excellent promotional tool for your event. That said, when marketing your event on Twitter, your content has to be unique so that you can out from the crowd. While it will take you a lot of time and effort, getting the right mix will deliver the results as a reward. At RBL Communications we are committed to making your next event a success by leveraging our collective experience and wisdom from marketing events and share all those experiences with you. The last thing you want to happen with your event is to fall short of its goals by falling short when it comes to taking full advantage of Twitter’s event marketing capabilities.
So, what are you waiting for? Leave us a comment, tell us your story, share your passion for event planning and marketing, or get in touch by email and we would be happy to help you plan and host your next event.
