In today’s world Social Media is rapidly becoming the number one way to communicate, not only locally, but globally. Facebook to date currently has around 845 million active users and Twitter around 140 million. These two statistics alone highlight the importance of being up to date with social media and making sure that you are connected with the world.
When it comes to marketing your event or conference Social Media is your best friend. Not only is it usually free, easily accessible and user friendly, it’s incredibly effective and can make a big impact on your past, present and future client base.
There are several things you can do on Facebook to advertise and bring attention to your conference;
1) Create a ‘page’ – A ‘page’ is almost like a fan site where people can ‘like’ your event, read up on news and info and stay in the loop about what to expect at the conference.
2) Create a Facebook ‘Event’ - Invite your Facebook friends along, highlight the date, times and location of the conference and keep tabs on attendance. You could also use a registration tool on there such as http://www.regonline.com/__event-registration/event-registration-tool or http://www.somethingon.com/.
3) Advertise – You can use an advert on Facebook. There is a cost for this service however you can reach your target customers such as those in a certain age bracket, location, interests or profession.
Twitter is a quick, easy and simple tool you can use to get the word out about your event.
1) Set up a ‘profile’ for your event – Tweet about things that your potential delegates could experience, count down the days till your event.
2) ‘Follow’- Follow other conferencing twitter accounts to help with networking and reaching other customers.
3) Hashtaging – Using a hash tag(#) in your tweets not only adds a bit of personality to your updates but focuses more attention on your event and puts emphasis on the key elements to your event such as it’s name or date. See here for some inspiration… http://www.tweetmyevents.com/.
As well as Facebook and Twitter there are several other social media services you can get stuck into. Blogging can be in incredibly effective, as well as sites such as Eventbrite, Eventful, Myspace and Tweetvite. You can also upload videos to Youtube and photos to Flickr then link these in with your Facebook page.
With Social Media the possibilities are endless but your main priority should be to advertise your event as quickly, easily and effectively as possible and using Social media will help you to do just that.
So start exploring online and happy ‘Tweeting’, ‘Blogging’, ‘Posting’, and ‘Uploading!’
