2020 has seen many shifts in marketing strategies, most notably the move to virtual events. This has shifted digital marketing efforts from the promotion of physical event attendance to online webinars, participation in online industry events, and other virtual seminars or meetups. It is important to quickly adapt to the changing landscape in many industries and the events world as a whole. Let’s explore the ways that social media event marketing can be used to quickly and effectively shift strategy to increase attendance, participation, and awareness for your online events, webinars, and virtual happenings. Read on to learn how to promote an event on social media!

1. Take Advantage of Organic Social Media Features

Incorporating messaging and promotion for upcoming events into ongoing social media strategies is a key component to increasing event awareness and ultimately, attendance. However, it is also critical to look to specialized features on social media platforms in order to make your event stand out. Social Media Stories, Facebook Events, Instagram Countdowns, Live Streams, etc. can significantly improve your social media strategy for events.

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2. Pay Attention to Your Messaging

As virtual events become more prominent for companies across the globe, refined messaging will be an even more critical component of an event social media plan. Digital marketers should put themselves in the shoes of their target audience. “Why should they take the time to attend this specific online event or webinar? What will be the benefit? Why is it worth it? It is important to consider what your audience needs and why it is crucial for them to attend your event, now more than ever” says Jacey King, a marketing manager at Boomessays review and Write my Australia.

3. Don’t Forget About Influencer Marketing

Cross-promotion with highly relevant industry influencers through outreach and collaboration is a great way to improve visibility, so you should definitely take advantage of that if you use social media for events promotion. However, simply increasing employee engagement and promotion of company executives’ insights around these events is an effective way to increase thought leadership and attendance.

As you ramp up online event efforts, incorporate cross-promotion with program speakers and encourage employee advocacy to drive registrations and results. There are a few ways to integrate employees and speakers. Tagging speakers and assisting with messaging guidelines for employees to get involved on social media will additionally help to spread your message and increase event participation.

4. Incorporate Paid Social Media Advertising

Along with organic social media promotion, don’t be scared to put some money behind your social media event planning, even if it’s virtual. Paid advertising on social platforms will increase the visibility and attendance of your event significantly, as it allows you to reach beyond your followers on the platforms. Consider using Lead Generation ads on LinkedIn, which require the target audience to fill out a form in order to capture important information such as name, email, and job title. “This list is then available directly on LinkedIn for you or your customer. These ads can target custom audiences using target lists, job titles, and/or industries – they even allow you to exclude competitors in order to further refine your audience” says Rossie Walter, a business writer at Revieweal and Australian reviewer.

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5. Create a Hashtag

Hashtags can also be an important element of your Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook event promotion strategy because they help users find all the content associated with a particular event across various social media channels.

In order to avoid confusion, try to come up with a hashtag that hasn’t been used much before. Otherwise, your event can get lost in loads of irrelevant content that won’t help you in any way. It’s most recommended to use unique, short, and easy-to-remember hashtags. They should also be easy to spell so that after saying them out loud, the audience can be able to write them down.

Additionally, you can encourage your followers to publish event-related content with your hashtag. It can significantly boost your social media event marketing as it will allow you to reach your audience’s followers as well.

6. Implement Post-Event Promotion

Often, there is a missed opportunity when it comes to post-event promotion of virtual events. While registrations and participation in the event itself is an important way to measure results and success, don’t let the promotion end once the event is over. Take advantage of the wealth of content presented and either distribute to your attendees to keep them engaged or repurpose it for your blog, website, and social media efforts. For example, creating gated on-demand versions of webinars or online seminars and re-sharing these across social media through both organic and paid channels will continue to increase relevant leads and build your network and audiences for the future. Another way to continue the promotion of the event is to create summaries in the form of social media posts or content assets and blogs that can then be shared on social media. This can include quotes from the event, videos summarizing important topics that came out of it, and testimonials from those that attended.

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Social media marketing is a critical piece to increasing participation, registration, and ultimately, growing your virtual events. Digital marketers should incorporate the above strategies, as well as keep a pulse on the competition and industry trends when it comes to virtual event marketing through social media.

The Bottom Line

How to promote a webinar on social media? Or any other online event? In short, by using all the different opportunities these platforms offer. Apart from publishing an encouraging event social media post now and then, you can use such features as Live Streams or Instagram Countdown Stickers to make the viewers more engaged and excited about what is going to happen.

What’s more, you should be in touch with your followers, letting them know you care about each of them by replying to their messages and comments, and providing satisfying answers to their questions. Another good practice that doesn’t cost you anything is coming up with a hashtag that will help your audience find and share the event-related content. Also, it can be very beneficial to invest in paid ads or influencer marketing to make more people aware of your upcoming event.

Last but not least, don’t forget about your event just after it comes to an end – keep in mind that photos, videos, testimonials, etc. can be very helpful in the future when you want to organize a similar event. Store them in an easy-to-reach place to get back to them by the next opportunity!