There is a common misconception that a Social Media Manager’s main job is to post on social media platforms. Trust me, that makes every one of us red with furry. Why, you might ask? Because apart from curating organic content, measuring engagement, running Ad campaigns, analyzing data and interpreting it to come up with actionable insights, we also manage and promote events.
Today, we shall focus on the latter. I will share a complete guide for promoting your event on social media, and a few PRO- tips that have worked for me for the past year.
An effective plan will include 3 major stages: pre-event, event day, and post-event. For my team and I, a Trello board comes in handy when outlining these stages, filling in a checklist of activities and assigning tasks to the team.
PRE- EVENT.
1. Set Key Goals & Metrics
Set objectives and goals you would like to achieve from this social media campaign. This will enable you to measure your performance against the set goals.
Depending on the nature of the event, your goals could be a particular number of sign-ups, ticket sales, brand awareness etc.
PRO TIP: Always have measurable goals. Use the numbers. E.g 200 ticket sales etc.
2. Event Content Calendar
Having a content calendar to cater for the marketing period makes the marketing process fun and efficient. It enables you to intentionally plan for audience engagement, break monotony and create excitement around your event.
You can share statistics related to the theme to give your audience context, guest profiles and fun facts about guests, polls etc.
PRO-Tip: Work with daily or weekly themes.
3. Ensure that all the Marketing Collateral is ready.
Depending on your choice of marketing collateral, ensure that they are ready at least 2–3 weeks prior to the event to allow for enough time for marketing.
PRO-TIP: If you will be using posters, ensure that you have the right dimensions for the different social media platforms.
Instagram feed post dimensions are different from those of Twitter and IG stories. You can communicate this to your design team or if you make the posters yourself, Canva has great resizing options with the correct dimensions.
A screenshot of JENGA School posters in different dimensions
4. Branded Hashtags
Branded hashtags are a great way to get your social media audience to engage with you during your event. Create Hashtags that are relevant to your event theme.
Be sure to use your hashtag on all your social media content & other marketing collateral.
Pro-Tip: When creating hashtags, go for a hashtag(s) that hasn’t had much prior use so that your event doesn’t get buried in a mountain of irrelevant content.
I also prefer to use sentence cases. E.g, TechTalent or #PowerToOurWomen.
Keep your hashtags short & easy to remember
5. Reminder Posts
Apart from the regular marketing posts, each platform has a unique way of reminding its users about events.
a. Instagram Countdown
A customized countdown to the event on Instagram stories coupled with some music is a great way to keep the event in your audience’s faces. Viewers also get the option of setting a notification for a reminder once the event goes live or even add your countdown to their own stories.
b. Add the event on LinkedIn’s ‘Event’ section
This appears on your company’s profile and your audience is able to see it as soon as they visit your page. What’s great about this option is that you can interact with your event attendees in the chat section.
c. Pinned Tweet
You can pin the main event poster and copy it to your Twitter profile so that it is the first post users see when they interact with your page.
6. Acquire the Correct Guest Handles
If you will be live-tweeting, it is important to have the correct guest Twitter handles so as to tag them.
For general marketing, depending on the social media platforms that your organization prefers, ensure you have the correct handles for your guests. You might want to get consent for tagging them, thereafter request them to engage with your posts through sharing and commenting, it creates a feeling of authenticity and increases your audience reach.
PRO-TIP: Always inform the team in charge of guest outreach to ask the guests for their social media handles once the speaker has confirmed their availability.
PRO-TIP plus: Unless your guest is officially representing the company/organization they work for, refrain from tagging those companies.
7. Precomposed messages & useful links
This is essential if you will be live-tweeting your event or sharing live snippets on IG stories- yes, this is a thing!
I pre-compose standard messages on a google document that the entire social media team on duty has access to.
Standard messages include welcome messages, panel introductions, engagement messages and CTAs.
If you would like your audience to visit your website or specific landing pages, have all those links ready in a doc.
PRO TIP: since this document is shared by the social media team sharing live snippets either on Twitter, YouTube or IG, encourage them to only copy and not cut the messages.
8. Monitor ticket sales/registrations
If your event requires one to purchase a ticket in order to have access to the event, monitor how each social media platform is contributing to the sign-ups, organically.
This data will be useful in marketing your next event as you will know where to put the most effort in and also identify platforms that require a better strategy.
At JENGA School, we use an Airtable form to check where our registrants are coming from. Our Data guy, Raff, even sets up a Slack bot that alerts us every time someone registers. How cool is that!
Alternatively, you can set UTM trackers on the landing page that people register from, and set a completed registration as a goal on google analytics.
EVENT DAY
1. Share Reminder Posts
A reminder 1 hour to the event is advisable. This is to enable last minute registrants (if your event requires registration) to do so and even set aside time on their calendars. I do my reminders an hour to, 30 minutes to and immediately the event begins.
2. Live tweet and/or share live snippets on IG
Sharing live updates is a perfect way to engage with your audience during the event as well as catch the attention of the general twitter/IG/YouTube audience. Think of it as creating FOMO.
Apart from tweeting main takeaways & powerful quotes from speakers, you can always include funny moments, polls and questions in your live tweet/IG snippets.
A tweet from a past JENGA School event
If you are strategic about it, your hashtags could even make it to the Twitter Trend list. This is music to any social media manager’s ears, right?
PRO TIP: Use your hashtags consistently across your tweets. Encourage your audience to also do so & retweet tweets that have your hashtags and are related to the event.
Remember to monitor your feeds to address any concerns or questions that come up for people.
POST EVENT
- Thank You cards for event attendees
Create a thank you card for event attendees and share them immediately after the event on your social media platforms. I make mine on Canva.
PRO TIP: Attach the event link, to the ‘Thank you’ note, for people who may have missed the event. If it was a YouTube event, then this will also contribute to the traffic to your channel and also increase the viewership of your event video.
A sample ‘Thank You’ Note for a past JENGA School event.
2. Run a post-survey
It is important to ask people what they thought of your event.
You can do so by sharing post survey form (google, typeform or IG stories polls) to your database of event attendees and/or followers. This could be done through email or regular social media post.
Such feedback will enable you to identify areas that you can improve on. You will also be in a position to find out what worked for you and maximize it for future events.
3. Snippets of Powerful/impactful sessions of the event.
As a social media manager, I set aside time to watch the entire event and identify parts that would be great for marketing. I share these timestamps with the video team who in turn make beautiful snippets out of them, accompanied with my desired CTA, which in most cases is to drive applications to our programs at JENGA School.
PRO TIP: These snippets are powerful marketing tools that can always be reused. It’s just a matter of changing the CTAS and VOs if any.
A snippet of Brian Solis, Global Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce speaking during JENGA School’s inaugural Graduation Ceremony.
4. Save Event Highlights to IG Highlights
IG Highlights allow you to organize your favourite story content and organize it under different labels that your audience can find easily. Unlike stories, highlights stay on the page for as long as one needs it to.
PRO TIP: You can have a general ‘events’ highlights and label all your events within it separately. Get a cool cover image for the event’s highlight.
5. Analyze your performance
Evaluation is necessary for every marketing campaign.
At JENGA School, we organize an event post-mortem where we measure the general performance of the team, including the Social Media Team’s against the goals we had set prior to the event.
Insights from this session will greatly inform your future social media strategies for events.
PRO TIP: Record these analytics for future reference.
With these insights, you should be able to get the best out of your events. If you have any additional tips, I’d be happy to engage in the comments section below.
