Social Media to boost Event Attendance

Using social media to enhance event attendance is considered essential, but HOW to utilize the many options is a question we all face.  CVent has just released a free e-book with practical tips on integrating social media into your next event.  You can download the book of tips here:  Event e-BOOK

See you on facebook, or digg, or twitter, or stumbleupon....  

Integrating Social Media in Events

 Integrating Social Media in promoting your events is no longer a "nice to have" but essential for public events (and often private corporate events).  Cvent is co-hosting a free webinar 4/14 with four excellent "event gurus" sharing their success stories with social media to promote their recent events.  

Social Media and Events Webinar: Thursday, April 14 @ 2PM EST/11AM PST

Registration & Info: LINK

Speakers include our web friend Julius Solaris (who created the Event Management LinkedIn Group) and Lara McCulloch-Carter, Chief Brand Storyteller at READY2SPARK. Looks like an insightful program. 

Successfully Promoting your Event Online

We all know event promotion strategies have been radically changed with the social media phenomenon. Below is an insightful guest post by Robert Grossman of Focus Creative distilling the most effective ways to utilize social media to promote your next event.  Hope you find this article as helpful as I did.

Social media strategy ideas before an event:

• Create a Facebook Event, pulling in all your event details. This creates a central location for attendees to begin to connect and share their excitement for the event.
• Create a Facebook Page. For larger events a dedicated page may be appropriate as a central location to engage with attendees and people interested in learning more about your event.
• On Twitter, create an event hashtag and promote it. Encouraging dialog with Twitter hashtags is an excellent way to build buzz around an event.  Then publicize the hashtag in advance across all channels—put it on your registration page, website, and use it in every single one of your Twitter posts.
• To encourage people to tweet - give out your hashtag and spread the word, sweeten the deal with a free pass, door prize or other giveaway for one lucky hashtag-er.
• Post the event to LinkedIn. At a bare minimum, you can create an update that includes a few words on why you are excited for the event and a link to your registration page. Send the invite out to all your LinkedIn connections.
• Seek out LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your event and let them know about it as well as sharing the event with specific contacts which LinkedIn easily lets you do.
• Build your own community. For the biggest and most complex events (typically conferences), building your own community may make sense.
• Learn where communities already are. Before the event, it’s critical to identify existing communities like those on LinkedIn, Facebook, or other forums and find out what they’re interested in. You can also use real-time search on Twitter to find out what your future attendees are talking about and hoping to gain from an event. Then use this knowledge to fine-tune the event content and make sure that it’s relevant for your audience.

Focus Creative helps fortune 500 companies and non-profits create engaging productions and presentations for sales meetings, share holder events, conferences, award shows, sales and marketing videos, training videos, post event videos and presentations.