Social media tips for event marketing

To promote and market your events effectively, you need to write quality social media posts. This applies to both posts about your events and posts about other topics besides your events, like those offering your expertise to add value to your audience. What you say and how you say it are both important to effectively engage with your audience. Quality social media posts should be interesting and informative. You can get creative and put together catchy posts but take care not to sound inauthentic, manipulative, or use click-bait approaches, which will not build trust with your audience. To build loyal and quality followers, you need to build trust by creating meaningful connections with your audience. Remember, you only have a few seconds to capture the attention of your audience. Once that moment is gone, there are thousands of other posts and posters filling in that space. Make each post count by providing quality and value that is most likely to translate into sales and registrations to your events.

The big "don'ts" include:

• Don't post links only without any descriptions. No one wants to click on a link that they know nothing about or have no context for, and such posts are a waste of your time and effort. This kind of social media posting does not add value and does not build trust with your audience. Lone links, especially shortened or obfuscated links, are viewed as spam and possible security threats.
• Don't use ambiguous wording. Use terminology that is quick to read and understand for the most effective communication. Remember, people are busy and don't have time to figure out what you are trying to say or if a link you posted is worth their time and effort to click on. 
• Don't use deceptive wording. The more straightforward and honest you are, the more you will build trust and loyalty from your audience.
• Don't just create promotional content. People don't want just to be marketed to. For best results, the ratio of social media posts should be much higher in favor of educational, valuable, and informative posts than promotional posts.

The big "do's" include:

• Do use actionable and results-oriented wording in your posts that generate engagement. For example, a post like “Learn how to make your home stand out this holiday season” engages your audience in an actionable and results-oriented way, versus just posting “Holiday Decorating Workshop." 
• Do use links with actionable posts. If you want your audience to take action, be sure to let them know how and where. Clear, honest, and informative post descriptions are important, but equally important are the links that should accompany them anytime you wish to drive your audience to one of your event pages or event registration forms. The easier you make it to learn about and register for your event, the more likely you are to capture potential attendees.
• Do use hashtags. If you post good descriptions and honest links, you will get the attention of your followers. But if you use hashtags that relate to your event, in addition to those key components, you increase the likelihood of more people and new people discovering your content and offerings.
• Do use images with most of your posts. As the saying goes, "a picture says a thousand words," and in our attention-deficit society where people are reluctant to read much and easily distracted, images prove to be very valuable at conveying messages. Posts with images also draw more attention to themselves. You can create your own images that represent your event(s) to accompany your posts or rely on your event image being automatically pulled by social networks when you include a link to your Corsizio event page as part of your post.

Tip 5: Share the Right Quantity of Social Media Posts

Next to the quality of your social media posts is the quantity of your social media posts. Too few postings and your social media presence can become irrelevant or forgotten. Too many postings are your posts can become ignored and blocked or unfollowed. Always keep in mind that people today are oversaturated with information and too many things and people competing for their attention. Therefore, to effectively marketing your events on social media, you have to find a sweet spot of the right frequency for your business needs. Otherwise, you risk your posts getting lost in the mix. For example, if you post only once during the week about your upcoming event, there is a high likelihood of most of your followers missing your post. If you post 2 to 3 times during the week about that upcoming event, you increase the chances of your message being seen without overdoing it. However, if you post each day of the week about your upcoming event, you increase the likelihood of people tuning you out.

The best way to find your balance when it comes to the right quantity of social media posts to market your event will depend on several factors, as follows:

• What social media network(s) you choose to use. For example, the nature of Twitter is better adapted to multiple posts per week and even per day, whereas the nature of Facebook is less so. If you are using something like YouTube to market your events, then you definitely wouldn't want to create a promotional video each day, but perhaps only two in the lead up to your event - one to announce the event and the other to remind people about it closer to its date. If you have a regular video show or podcast, then you can mention your event each time, but again you need to balance the ratio of valuable content to promotional content wisely.
• The nature of your audience. The more focused and loyal your audience is, the less you need to market and post promotional content. The more open-ended and wide-ranging your audience is, the more you need to market and post promotional content.
• The quality of your posts. The more fresh, unique, and creative your posts are about your events, the more likely they will be paid attention to and enjoyed. This provides you with the flexibility of posting more often. However, the more you post the same messages and images about your event, the more likely they are to be ignored, and thus, it would not make sense to be posted very often.

To save time and be as efficient as possible, there are many apps today that can integrate your social media networks together so that instead of posting to two, four, or more different networks separately, you can post to them all at once. Examples of such apps include HootSuite, Tweetdeck, or Buffer. Many of the social media networks themselves will also allow you to schedule future posts for automated postings.

Such automated posting may work in many cases, but it may not be the ideal way to go in all cases, especially when trying to do targeted marketing for your event. For starters, you may have slightly different demographics of people following you on your different networks that would benefit from more uniquely tailored messages. Additionally, consider that if the same audience follows you on several networks, they will be subjected to the same message and wording, creating a robotic image of your approach. It is better to create many unique messages and then schedule them to come out at various time intervals and across different social networks. Formating, character, and other restrictions may also prevent you from posting the same thing across multiple networks. For example, an Instagram post functions quite differently from a Twitter post.

It will work better for some people to commit to a small amount of time each day, say 10, 20, or 30 minutes, to create and post to social media networks and engage with their audience. For other people, a longer and specifically set chunk of time once a week will work better, during which they can create, plan, and schedule all of their social media posts for the week. There is no one best approach in this regard. However, if you have an upcoming event that you are marketing actively, then it is wise to check in with your audience on your social networks at least daily, unless you have set notifications on, in case you receive any questions or comments about your events that require timely replies.

Whatever approach you choose when posting to market your event on social media, be mindful of how you are using your time and not get distracted by going through others' content when you should be focused on making your own. Our time is a precious resource today, and the more we use it mindfully and effectively, the more we can accomplish to meet our personal and professional needs best.

There are numerous considerations and ways of marketing your event via social media networks, and, as with all things, some trial and error will go a long way. The most important takeaway from this tutorial is that to be effective and successful in your event marketing efforts, you need to take action, authentically offer quality information, and post on a schedule that fits your business needs.