Using Social Media-Before an Event

By Samantha Champagne

Social media has now become the way of life. It is our way of communicating, connecting, advertising and keeping up to date with information. So if you have the privilege to have access to a social media platform – use it! It is virtually free advertising and will increase your attendance level at your next event. Here are 3 tips to when using social media before your event.

  1. Promote, promote, promote! If you are going to advertise your event you need to be active and regular. Twitter is a quick and easy way to give a shout out to keep your event on their radar. It’s also a great way to put links to your webpage or to where they are able to purchase tickets. With Facebook, keep it to a weekly basis. If you post too much, people will get annoyed with the event posts, filling up their newsfeed. When you do weekly, this is still keeping it in their point of view, but not overkill.
  2. Set up a Facebook Event Page. This is a great way to balance your posting content by keeping your event information on your event page, and generic business posts on your business’s Facebook Page. You will then have two different audiences to interact with and have an area to keep up to date information about the event. This is also a perfect opportunity for your guests to post questions or even show how excited they are about your event.
  3. Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. Using crowdsourcing is a perfect way to find out what exactly your audience wants; whether it is suggestions for speakers, comedians or even a band, this opens the floor for your audience to comment, retweet or even share yours and their ideas. Generating funds and donations for non-profit events can be tough leading up to an event; so having a post that’s related to crowdfunding could really be beneficial. For example, you could always post a link and explanation for where they can donate; successful crowdfunding can get an average of 193 likes and 57 tweets.