Last week, we spoke about how social media marketing is about both conversation and conversion. In this post, we’re going to focus on events, which is a great tactic to maximize conversion from a fan to a presentation attendee or sales presentation. As an Internet marketing firm, before we jump into things, let me start off by saying that you want to promote events through all channels as an aligned, promotional campaign with a consistent message. It’s about building a full campaign with a planned sequence of invitations and communication.
Let’s take a look at Facebook and how it can be utilized to promote your upcoming event. There are four main sections that can be used for this purpose. The first is the events tab. Facebook allows you to create an events tab to upload your upcoming events and link it to an events registration page. This is a great way for you to maintain an events presence within Facebook, where fans can quickly and easily find out about upcoming events. The second place to promote your events is through your wall. By promoting on your wall, you are broadcasting the message to your fans. This is where you want to use a sequence of invitations from your first invitation for the event to your last chance to register invitation. The third place that you can promote your event is through the use of your logo image on the left side bar. While many companies use this for their logo only, there is nothing that stops you from being more creative and including a small promotion for an upcoming event. The fourth way that you can promote your event is considerably more indirect than the first three, and that is through the use of photos. Facebook automatically selects images from a folder within your photos folders. If you have an upcoming event, you can create a folder of photos of your events to support your overall message.
With LinkedIn, there is an events application that is easy to integrate into your LinkedIn profile. When you have an event, simply update the event in the LinkedIn events application and your entire LinkedIn network is made aware. If a member of your network RSVPs for the event, their entire network will also find out! The only down side to LinkedIn is that the RSVP feature is a manual process, which creates some problems for event registration. And if you include a URL to your registration page, they will not be automatically entered in as an RSVP, which means that their networks will not be aware of the registration. LinkedIn also includes additional channels to promote events such as groups.
Twitter does not provide nearly as much functionality as Facebook or LinkedIn, but it is another powerful channel to promote events. With Twitter, you want to send several invitations spread out over a few weeks. You can also utilize the background image to include details about the upcoming event just as you can with Facebook. The key with social media marketing of events is to treat them as a campaign and integrate them with the rest of your event marketing channels including email marketing, PPC, and any other channels that you are using to drive traffic to the event.