Speaker 1: What's up, everybody? This is Brian Pfeiffer of MarketingMeetHead.com. Today I'm going to talk about seven effective ways to use social media to promote an event. Social media plays a critical role in event marketing these days. For close to two decades, I have been promoting large events at nightclubs and festivals. Some of my more famous ones include the Haunted Halloween Ball, the New Year's Eve Party in Chicago, formerly the Chicago NYE Ball. By having a great social media strategy for promoting your event on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, you can significantly increase your sales and profits while spreading awareness about your event and your brand and your mission. Whether you're hosting a rock concert or a business conference, social media has proven to be an effective tool in boosting event attendance. If you're planning an upcoming event, check out these social media strategies. Number one, create and share a Facebook event. Creating a Facebook event is easy. It's an easy way to increase your visibility of the event and provide the public with the critical information they may need. Through a Facebook event, people can directly comment, ask questions about the event. It also boosts engagement. So to create a Facebook event is real simple. Just go to the top right, hit the Create tab, and then the Event tab. Fill out all the critical information. Choose a descriptive name, a photo, a video, something to accompany the text. And be sure to also add the keywords to ensure your event shows up in the search engine results page or the SERP. Schedule regular reminder posts. You may have people interested in going to the event, but there's a chance they may have forgot. They might need a little nudge. They want to get some tickets, but they just haven't bought them yet. Get them excited about attending the event. With regular posts, remind them why they should come. Start your marketing efforts at least one month in advance and take advantage of multiple platforms and reach as many people as possible. When sharing reminder posts, be sure to focus on quality over quantity by explaining why they should attend the event and what will be offered at the event. I like to post all my personal profiles, my fan pages, my groups, and my Instagrams. Make use of branded hashtags. Hashtags are commonly used on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram to identify the topic of interest. Also on Facebook now and LinkedIn and YouTube, they're using hashtags by the way. By using a branded hashtag for your event, you can make it easier for people to find information about your event. It can also generate a little bit of excitement and conversation around that hashtag. Use interest-based hashtags as well to reach certain audiences. For example, if you're hosting a conference to empower women, you may want to try a hashtag like conference for women or women empowerment. For my above event, I used the haunted Halloween ball. Start early with your event, that's number four, and be consistent. You don't want to create a Facebook event and then just simply walk away. You want to start making your marketing efforts early and be consistent, posting until the day of the event and possibly even after to generate some buzz. By constantly posting, you'll continue to pique interest of potential attendees and encourage discussions about your event. I love to use past event pictures and videos. If you have them to get people sharing them on social media and whatnot, that's really important. Also, be sure to provide any updates or new information about the event as you receive it to keep people in the loop and let them know what they can expect at the event. Number five is schedule posts ahead of time. I have a VA that helps me with this. Event planning takes a significant amount of time and energy. It's easy to allow smaller details like social media posts to slip through the cracks. Unfortunately, when you fail to market the best of your ability, you often find a decrease in attendees. To ensure you're pumping out the proper quality and quantity of posts, schedule them ahead of time. There are numerous social media scheduling tools you can use to promote your events, content automatically, and give your audience a steady stream of information. I personally like to use Storito for desktop posting to Instagram stories. I also like to use Instagram feed posts, a tool called Hopper HQ, and then for regular posts, groups, fan pages, and whatnot, I tend to use Hootsuite the most. If you'd like to check out Storito and Hopper HQ, I do have an affiliate link below. If you buy through that link, we make a small commission and it does help support the channel. Number six is run engagement ad campaigns. Social media ad campaigns can boost engagement and get more people interested. Facebook and Instagram both have options for creating ad campaigns, while Twitter and LinkedIn have made it easier now to target certain audiences and connect with other businesses. Platforms like Facebook allow you to prioritize which users will ultimately see your ad. You can also see what types of users are most likely to interact with your ad. By boosting the event directly from the event page, the campaign is similar to a sponsored post. I don't recommend this. For my Halloween and my New Year's paid social media strategies, I use page post engagement ads, video ads actually, from the ads manager, and then I use that to increase awareness and social proof, and then I retarget the people that have been to the website and the Eventbrite page with image ads because they haven't purchased yet. And usually I use about six image ads to hit them with different ad creatives and whatnot so they don't get bored with my typical advertising. Number seven on my list is host contests with fun prizes. Contests are a fun way to increase event attendance through engagement. Hosting a contest can also give your business new followers on all your pages. To make sure people want to participate in your contest, offer a prize, of course, that people really want to win. I offer free VIP tickets to my New Year's Eve event and let the main Chicago radio station like V96 give away these tickets on the radio as well. Other ideas for a contest are a voucher, a free meal, free merchandise, a backstage pass, iPads are popular. Once you have hosted the contest on the social media platform, promote it through email and across other social media platforms, okay? Everyone loves to win and receive prizes and a contest is a perfect way to connect the event to like a fun contest. And after somebody wins, make sure you share that on social media and show that they've won and it gets people kind of excited that there are winners. Today, no event is complete without social media presence. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, similar platforms that made it easy to reach hundreds or even millions of people with just a few clicks of a button. However, that doesn't mean that social media marketing doesn't take work. It is up to the event holder to create the posts that will engage and target the audience and urge them to attend. Event holders must also post regularly to keep potential attendees interested in attending and not back out. More and more event organizers and marketers making use of social media when hosting events for a good reason. With so many highly engaged users, social media platforms are able to instantly generate a buzz about the upcoming event while increasing the visibility of your brand online. If you'd like to learn more about paid social media traffic, check out my free affiliate marketing course. I'm going to put a link for that below. I'm also going to include a link below to my 2019 New Year's Eve campaign in which I spent $300 and made over $20,000. I'm the Marketing Meathead. Hopefully you enjoyed today. We'll talk to you later. Thank you.