Six Favorite Social Event Promotions


I took this photo at an American Red Cross event.

There are many great sources of advice for how to use social media to help marketing your event. As time progresses, many of these tactics evolve. I have created many a social media event over the years, so here are my six all-time favorite social event promotion tactics.

1) Hashtagged conversations and promotion on Twitter, Google+ & Instagram has to be the #1 go-to tactic. Using hashtags like #pmiemea #pmot is a great way to flag interested parties to a relevant conversation. They can search and add RSS streams based on the hashtag, and jump into conversations with people even if they are not following them. Hashtags allow you to measure relevant conversations and track positive and negative memes. Much has been said recently about hashtag spam, but I still find this to be the most relevant tactic.

2) Blog and event content in advance extends interest and buzz about the event to relevant social networks. It provides searchable content that empowers you to educate interested parties who are looking for more details on Google, Bing, and other search sites. Content after the event educates those who couldn’t attend about relevant findings, or in the case of photos, who was there!

3) Live stream for extended audiences allows you to have a greater audience! It’s harder to have the same experience on video, but many people like to tune in during work. This of course gives your event and content a wider reach, and makes for a larger extended conversation.

4) Photograph sharing and reusing on Facebook albums, Pinterest boards, Instagram, and Flickr extends the life of the event. As mentioned in number 2, it is a highly valuable form of content for extending an event’s life. But it gives people more than that. It’s something to talk about. It’s also the easiest form of content to crowdsource. People point and click with their smartphones and upload.

5) Sharing speaker content with YouTube, Slideshare, & Scribd is another favorite content tactic. It’s a great way to present content on blogs, get it indexed into search engines for long term viability, and to extend the conversation. No one does this better than the TED and TEDx series of conferences.

6) Aggregating content using Storify allows conference organizers and/or attendees to share using the many data points generated during an event across social networks. This is an extremely easy tool to use. It’s a great way to curate content and helps tell a larger story. Different viewpoints via Storify are possible thanks to curation, and the selection of which tweets and updates. A Spotify story makes for a great blog post.

What is your favorite tactic to promote a social event?

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