After putting in all of that hard work getting your virtual event off the ground, you face the hard truth that you need to get more people in front of your amazing content. There are a lot of traditional ways to acquire audience. You could send out mailers (expensive!). You could buy email lists (spam!). You could put a flier on some telephone poles (tedious!). Or, you could take advantage of a massive amount of personal referral power! Easy wins, right?
Facebook events are quick to set up, come with a bunch of options for configuration and are FREE. Mari Smith has an excellent post about effectively using facebook to promote your events that every event-based marketer should check out.
Add some muscle behind your event with a simple facebook ad that will direct traffic from targeted users to your event page. Check out facebook’s advertising site to learn how to get started.
Facebook events are important because they create viral awareness. Every action that a user takes on facebook is subject to posting in their feed, which all of their friends will see. When a user indicates that they are attending your event, that action will be displayed to their entire network, creating viral awareness. Others with similar interests will check out your event, too, and you didn’t have to pay a dime for the advertising. Sweet! Read Mari’s whole post to find out how to make this work for you.
The second easy win for the day is using LinkedIn events. They carry the same principles as facebook events with viral awareness because users can either indicate that they are attending or that they are “interested.” Both of these activities will cause an entry in the user’s feed, which will be displayed to their contacts. LinkedIn also offers this service for FREE! Check out the video below to learn what LinkedIn Events are all about and how to get started:
LinkedIn is a business network so you could argue that it is more important to promote there because the viral interest may be more effective (assuming that people’s business networks share the same interests they do – more so than personal networks, anyway). They have also added an “events hub” so that you can see what events all of your connections are attending. Sounds viral to me!
Regardless of what you do to promote your event, taking advantage of these two free methods to create viral awareness of your event is sure to pay off. How can it not when your total investment is a whopping $0!
Bonus Tip: LinkedIn Events are prone to search engine crawlers, so you will have one more reason to promote your event on LinkedIn. Be sure to target your keywords when you write your event title and description!
Tags: event promotion, facebook, linkedin, Social Media, social networking
Nice post Steve. I consider Facebook the flagship of social networking sites. Their infrastructure allows for simple, yet affective conversations which to me is the backbone of social networking. These conversations exist in all aspects of the site, which I think is the reason for their success.
Without a doubt. Facebook is a great example of a site that started basic and grew its feature set on top of an excellent platform. They have set the standard for all other social networking sites for sure.
I like those LinkedIn events. Thanks for sharing!
Let’s give Twitter some love too. The benefit that Twitter has over LinkedIn and Facebook is that the content is open and available to anyone – not just members of your network.
Grab a Twitter account for your event and/or make up a unique hashtag to associate with any content related to the event. It’s also a great way to track and integrate conversations before, during and after and expand your personal network of followers/friends.
Hey Scott, Twitter hashtags relating to online events is definitely an upcoming post. Stay tuned!
I think we can all agree that social networking is not going away and has become a valuable tool in both personal and professional applications. What I think is great is that right now the main sites (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) all have a different set of programs that can add value to your objectives in different ways. The best thing to do is hit them all in the ways they work best.