When choosing material, I wonder what topics interest me the most and decision was pretty easy. Event tourism is interesting to me and it was nice to learn how event marketing in social media works.
How about the material?
So I chose Event marketing 2.0 as the material for the task. The material tells about ”How to boost attendance through social media”. The text explains the different social media channels and how they can be utilized in marketing. In addition, the text explains various rules and tips to make marketing smooth and effective.
One good advice in text is that when marketing an event, it is important to communicate with potential customers. In practice, it means receiving all kind of feedback and trying your best to respond to the various comments you receive. Thus, people will get a good picture of you and your event and they will find that you are also interested in their opinions. Text says ”By empowering people to give feedback and share stories about your event in social media, you’ll get tons of wonderful, free exposure.” This tells you how much more tools social media marketing has than just publishing.
Where to start your marketing process?
The main platforms for marketing the text tells you about are Twitter, LikedIn, Facebook and Youtube. One of the most important marketing tool in addition to these is the event’s own website. In most cases the best way to start your marketing is to create websites that describes the event as good as possible. The material says about websites homepage: “It serves as the hub of your online event marketing and is most likely what pops up when somebody searches for your event in search engines.” I agree that it is important to start by creating own pages to the event where you can find all the information about it. After that you can start creating different ways to market the event and create visibility for it.
Different platforms can work for different events
All of these platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Youtube) works little differently but there are similarities as well. Virtually all of these can publish very different content such as images, videos and text. I think that Youtube and LinkedIn are better options for bigger events. Youtube’s advantage is that it’s owned by Google and because of that video content published in Youtube tends to rank high on Google searches. In other applications you can make different kind of posts but in Youtube you can just post videos. In other apps you can also upload videos but they are shorter there. Of course in Youtube like any other application people can comment on your post and you can reply to them. In my opinion this is the best way to communicate with potential customers on social media. Like I said above, it gives people the impression that you care about them and their opinions. It also affects the image of the whole event.
Also Twitter is a great place to market a big event. The text says “If you have a large audience of your event (over 1000 attendees), then Twitter is a great place to generate a buzz and awareness and amplify the conversations about your event.”
Facebook may also work for bigger events but for smaller events I would recommend this platform. In Facebook you can create own pages for the event and send a link to that and also send an invitations via email. You can select guests how you want. For better visibility you can share your event on relevant Facebook pages and groups.
Conclusion
In my opinion in most cases the best is to combine a few different platforms for marketing. Using different channels will make your event visible to the widest possible audience. All in all I think that social media is a really good place to market your event. Especially now when people may not be moving as much as before, for example normal posters may not be very effective. Also nowadays people use social media a lot for different purposes and social media offers a lot of different opportunities for marketing.
References
Event marketing 2.0. How to boost attendance through social media.