One powerful element in boosting your online event’s engagement lies in the marketing. It’s important for event planners to establish a good marketing strategy. Social media are considered to be effective marketing tools these days due to its high engagement rates. According to the data by Emarsys, the number of daily social media users in 2019 is 3.5 billion and it keeps growing each day. This just shows how useful it is to utilize social media as a marketing tool for online events. Therefore, we will provide an insight of several social media that are commonly used by marketers. Here are the lists.
Based on the survey conducted by Event Manager, Facebook has been the most popular platform for event planners, and 52% of them admit that Facebook is the most effective social media to promote their events. Beside useful for event promotions, Facebook is also preferred for managing audiences as well as building communities. There are some latest features on Facebook that can be used to connect with your target audience, for instance, Live streaming, Facebook Ads, Facebook Stories, Facebook Events. We will specify these features below.
Live streaming
Facebook Live allows you to broadcast your events to your audiences to keep them updated with your latest events.
Facebook Ads
With the number of brands that promote their product through Facebook, it is no wonder if Facebook Ads begins to make its way to the marketplace. Facebook Ads Manager also enables you to track what kind of mobile devices that your audiences use from ad clicks.
Facebook Stories
Facebook Stories allows you to post an update about your events in the format of images or video. You can also make use of the AR (Augmented Reality) filters to make your stories more interesting to see.
Facebook Events
Facebook Event lets its users to schedule an event and connect with communities. Your platform or brand will appear in your audience’s newsfeed once they are interested in joining your event. This may serve as a way to create a bigger engagement of your brand. If you have sponsors, it would be even better for your promotion. You can extend the promotion by adding your event to calendars on other Facebook pages. Facebook has tools which will analyze the data of your customers and produce lists of potential customers as a result. In fact, it is a good thing to use event page for promoting your event, as you can update your event anytime, give a reminder to the users about the event time, and know how many people will attend your event.
Bizzabo
Bizzabo offers the facilities you need for managing your event. One of the tools is Ticket Boost, which allows event planners to reach more audiences through social platforms, and will eventually lead to bigger company profits. You can manage your Bizzabo website without any coding required by only using its drag and drop builder to create a customized and sleek layout for the website. Bizzabo has advanced contact management tools that let you segment contact, track session registrations, and change ticket details. Communicating with your attendees can be done effortlessly before, during, and after the event with the help of its on-brand emails. Using the same tools, engaging with key stakeholders becomes a trouble-free job.
IBM Cloud Video
IBM Cloud Video is an online platform where you can perform live or on-demand videos to audiences. With this platform, you can easily broadcast your contents through mobile app or the website itself. You may also track who your viewers are and how long they tuned in by using its real-time analytics. Its interactive tools allow you to interact with audiences and let them give feedback to you. Not only that, this platform gives you the ability to monetize the video and control access to ads or subscription-based system. It offers several pricing plans, such as 30-day free trial, silver plan, gold plan, and platinum plan, starting from $99.00/ month.
Quora
Aside from being a social media platform that provides answers and questions for its users, Quora can also be used for marketing. In 2018, Quora gained 300 million monthly visitor and also 55 million pages of content and they keep increasing as per today. However, promoting your brand on Quora is a bit tricky as you normally don’t sell something there. Instead, you get yourself recognized by people. To get started, you must set up an optimal profile and create a good impression that makes people interested to follow you. Since Quora is a platform in which people look for information and ask questions, upvotes from people helps you a lot in gaining recognition.
Upvote here means the number of people who agree with and appreciate the opinion of the person who writes an answer. To gain upvotes, you need to provide a thorough answer each time you try to answer a question. Interesting answer with a lot of views and upvotes is more likely to be shown on timeline and automatically gets recognized by a lot of people which are possibly your target audience. In Quora, you can also follow specific topic or issue that is related to your specialties, for example technologies or health. You might discover many ideas from other people’s answers or questions that you can use as an inspiration to create a content for your website.
Medium
Medium, almost similar to Quora, is a blogging platform where anyone can express their ideas through writings. The contents, also known as stories, are the highlight of this platform as they contain thought-provoking ideas and opinions from many authors. To be able to enjoy reading the contents, however, you must subscribe and become a member first. That being said, Medium is an interesting blogging platform since you can make money out of your writing, but at the same time you can also gain many audiences from it.
For marketers, this is truly an opportunity to let their brand rise. It also gives stats regarding views and reads which inform whether your content is actually read by people and has meaningful value. Another interesting thing to note about Medium is that its algorithm doesn’t sort its contents based on the publication date or popularity of the author. Instead, it places the stories with the best quality on top of the feed to make sure that the readers do not waste their time on click-bait headlines only.
So, if you plan on using Medium as your marketing tool, it is essential to provide captivating stories to tell which can attract more audience and leave bigger impacts on your brand. Also, you might want to insert links on your content or bio that connects to your website or social media in order to drive traffic.
Instagram is also increasing in terms of user engagement due to the features that keep evolving and adapting with the latest trends. It doesn’t only serve as a platform to share images and videos, but also to gain audiences. Its features allow you to create contents which will keep your audience interested. Since Instagram is a user-generated content, the chance of your event being promoted by other users is huge. Once someone receives a positive impact from your content or event, there is a big opportunity that your brand would spread to other people by the power of word of mouth.
To make it happen, you need to create engaging contents that persuade users to come to your event. It doesn’t have to be something fancy, but for example, you can start by posting some photos which indicate how fun your last event was. You might want to include some of your audience’s poses while receiving souvenirs or gifts from your event. If your event is held online, you might consider posting few teasers of the speakers which encourage people to attend the event. Lots of simple things can be used as a marketing tools, so it really depends on your creativity on how you apply it for your company.
Instagram Stories
Instagram develops similar feature to Snapchat which is called Instagram Stories. You can post any image or video that will remain in your profile within 24 hours. The highlight feature enables you to keep the stories available even after a day. Instagram Stories also provides a lot of filters in order to beautify your stories. Many people are using various templates as well to gain more interests. Use Instagram Stories to post “Behind the Scenes” of your event, or other glimpses of interesting activities that you want to show to your audience.
Live Instagram
Live Instagram is also great for promoting your event. By doing Instagram Live, you can share real-time video of what your company is currently up to. You may give them some teasers before the event takes place, so that it will drive more curiosity.
Hashtag
Putting hashtags in every single content that you’re going to post is a must. Hashtags can boost engagement and reach more people with the same interest.
*You can use MobileMonkey chatbots to streamline Facebook and Instagram messages and promote your events on the channels.
Who doesn’t know Twitter these days? Aside from being a big platform to connect and share thoughts with massive audience, Twitter also functions as a tool to gain your brand’s popularity. With over 365 million monthly active users, it is no wonder that marketers always find a way to promote their brand through the platform. It is actually not that hard to get recognized on Twitter. As we can see, a lot of online events are shared through Twitter and they are spread very rapidly. It is mainly due to the number of shares or retweet that people make. Here are several ways to get your brand popular on Twitter.
Twitter Chat
First, you can host a Twitter Chat, which is an online forum where you can communicate with your audience and spread awareness of your brand through a certain topic. In this case, you must create a unique hashtag that represents your brand for the event, so that anyone who is interested in joining the hype can easily keep up with the update. Almost similar to any live chat, your audience can interact with you by tweets.
Twitter Ads
Running ads on your tweet is possible on Twitter. Depending on the type of promotion: Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts, and Promoted Trends. Placing ads can help you get more exposure which will lead to more engagement
Tagging accounts with large audience and put some hashtag
Mentioning accounts with a lot of followers that are related to the thing that you’re promoting might work if you want to increase awareness of your brand. Chances are your event will get retweeted by those accounts if they are interested in the event that you’re holding. Also, never underestimate the power of hashtags. Using a lot of hashtag will increase your brand’s exposure and eventually gain some new followers.
TikTok
TikTok has become more popular in today’s society. Other than being a platform for entertainment, this platform can also serve as a great marketing tool for your brand. With one billion monthly active users, and currently being the third most downloaded non-gaming app, TikTok becomes the most successful video-sharing app worldwide. Almost all brands use this opportunity to promote their event or product through their TikTok account. One of the strategies to boost customers is by encouraging people to create videos of your product. To promote events, you can create some contents about your event or challenges and make it as interesting as possible. Your content has to be genuine and specific if you want to build trust with your audience.
Buffer
Having only one platform to engage with your audience is not recommended these days as many platforms are growing rapidly. That being said, you should consider having more than just one social media in order to make your brand bigger and reach more audiences. Buffer is the solution when it comes to managing your social media accounts for your business. It allows you to plan and schedule when to post, analyze the engagement of our content, and connect to multiple URLs in your profile, for instance, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Not only that, it also gives you suggestions of what time is best to post, which might optimize the engagement of your brand. Based on its website, more than 75.000 companies use Buffer to develop their brands.
Promoting events nowadays can also be done through LinkedIn, which is known for its notable function as a job search website. It also comes with a group feature, which allows people to connect with other people with the same interest. This way, it will make you easier to reach out to your audience, sponsors, and other partners involved in your event. Create interesting articles which contain meaningful issues and discuss it in the group along with other members. You can always keep the group open for public, if you don’t mind having people seeing your posts, or you can just keep it private, in case you want specific people to know the information. Start making a LinkedIn account for your business to grow your platform bigger.
Hootsuite
Having more than 18 million customers, Hootsuite offers many reliable features you can use to increase engagement. You can view the analytics before and after the event to figure out what you need to improve. It enables you to plan, create, and schedule social contents for every social media you have.
Why should you use social media as marketing tools for your online events?
- People use social media
First of all, let’s take a look at social media statistics. Based on Lyfemarketing, 91% users likely access social media from their mobile devices. It shows that using social media as a marketing tool is a great way to engage with customers. The era is now digital, and technology brings us the ability to promote our brand virtually, but still looks appealing. Making use of social media to reach more audience is one of the ways to adapt to the current globalization period. Besides, it is way more effective and efficient compared to manual promoting, as we only have to rely on our gadgets and creativity to make sophisticated contents.
Another thing to note is that people tend to start their shopping journey via online. In fact, about 63% of shopping occasions begin online. Most people do their research on the product that they are interested to buy, so it is important to create an eye-catching layout of your display product. The same thing goes with online event. People tend to look for something to do when they are bored. Online events become one of their destinations when it comes to looking for activities to do.
- Inexpensive
A lot of social media platforms are built for free, so it can be very cost-effective to rely on them in order to promote an online event. All you need is just a gadget and internet connection. Pretty simple, isn’t it? Neither you need to waste paper for flyers nor energy for spreading the flyers. However, paid options are also available if you want to create more impact to your promotion. Aside from being a cost-cutting option, promoting your event through social media is way more efficient since it saves so much time as you don’t need to operate your gadget all the time.
- Easily engaged with attendees
Keeping your attendees engaged with your event is a plus point. Social media is one of the ways to stay connected with your attendees wherever they are. Always give informative contents before, during, and after the event to increase the engagement rate. You should not leave your social media feed blank without any content to display. Finding a topic or content to post can be made easy by following the current trends or popular hashtags. This way, your platform will always get up to date and provide relatable information for your attendees.
All in all, social media can be a good marketing strategy if used properly. Knowing your target audience and establish a way to connect with them through your contents might be a good start.
