Engaging Social Media Effectively in Event Marketing

People started living in social media more than in real world. Therefore new social networks and communities are being sprung up like grass in the lawn. These are helpful in making friends around the globe and share everything you got in your lives with them. For a businessman, it is a great place to show case his business strategies in making customers out of his friends circle. That’s not what all I got for you in this article. We are also going to see how event marketing can be done effectively through social media.

Internet has its roots in every field of business now. Event management is one of those. It is a great opportunity for event managers to promote their events on the internet through social media networks. It is found that more than 60% of the event manages are already using social media for promotions of their events. In them the mostly used social medias include twitter, facebook, pinterest and instagram. Let’s see how can we engage the social media effectively in event marketing

Provide real-time updates

Live streaming the event on internet is one of the best ways to promote your event on the social media. If you can’t go live, at least make sure you are publishing frequent updates of the event in a bit-by-bit fashion.

Explore the famous event management coverage sites and learn how they for it. For example, watch The Verge covering live events of Apple and other tech companies in a bit-by-bit fashion, in fact it is the best and cheapest method.

Sign up for ad campaigns

Social media is now expanding beyond to its possibilities now. social networking giants like Facebook have already running lakhs of ad campaigns of different companies and events. They show ads in the middle of the news feed labeled as ‘recommended’ or ‘sponsored posts’. When scrolling down for stories, no one would notice the label and consider them a part of their news feed.

Ad campaigns are best way of promoting an event on facebook. They are available in different tariff plans based on our affordability.

Use hashtags

Hash tags were initially introduced in twitter and later implemented by other social networking sites also. Using an hashtag would bring to the notice of more number of social network users than not using it. It builds reputation on social media of your event in return. People will start recognizing your event as a brand when they come across about this hash tag.

Create a fan page

Using hash tag is fine. How many of your customers you think they know it?

It is essential to have your own network of  fans, followers or whatever the name you wanted to give them. Just because they wanted to see your updates, the would start following you. So it is better to create a fan page that accumulates all the interested people together at one place.

Using abbreviated hash tags won’t help you until they are explained the meaning for it. For example, if you are promoting an event of the movie 'Fast and Furious 6’, using #FnF6 won’t actually strike for  your fans of what you are talking about. You should either talk about the movie ‘Fast and Furious 6’ in the update or use the word ‘Fast and Furious 6’ at least.

Display the social media activity

You can use the services that are available to display the social streaming activities of your event in real time. Place monitors in the event showing the real time updates about it with the hash tag. It will encourage the attendees follow the stream and participate in the social media conversations. This will spread the word about your event in social networks and apparently the event will be a great success.

Be careful about the last point as it may fail to impress your guests and attendees of the event if the social media conversations about it are going ugly. You could also manage to filter the negative posts and updates about your event in displays if you could afford a person who can take care of managing the social media stream.

Decorate the event with brand promoting banners

Decorating the event is one of the crucial ways of promoting an event. Don’t forget to place brand promoting banners at places with good lighting conditions. They not only get focused by attendees but also useful when they take photos standing before it.

What I mean is, as I said before, people live on internet communities to make friends and share their lively events with them in the form of photos and videos. They would definitely look for something to put into their photos that could prove that they had attended the event. This is the reason why celebrities pose to cameras with event branding backgrounds.

Hope that helps!

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