A Brilliant Guide To Brand & Event Promotion Using Social Media
Why use Social Media? Aside from the fact that every other company is seeing success with it, the use of social media for brand and event promotion is rapidly growing (and working).
To begin, what platforms should you use?
With many choices to choose from, the easiest way to find out the best platforms for your brand is to seek out your competitors and identify what they are doing. Keep in mind, the most successful brands are targeting their customers through as many channels as they can. For instance, the use of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram together can be used to promote and reach your audience effectively due to each platforms unique strengths.
Twitter includes the power of the retweet. This gives you an opportunity to post information that others can deem important by “retweeting it” or liking it. The more of this activity that your account or post presents, the more credible you appear to your future customers.
Facebook is most useful for targeting a specific audience. You have the power to present people with information with the ease of knowing your information is being received by your target audience (not just anyone on Facebook).
According to Dakota Shane Nunley Via The Mission, you can “hand-select who sees your ads by geographic region, age, interests, gender, etc. So if you own a hotdog stand in southeastern Oregon, you won’t have to worry about getting email queries from John Stumperstein in Tampa, Florida who is hungry and angry and wants your hotdogs. The same cannot be said about other platforms, such as Instagram and Twitter.”
Instagram is simply a great way to present your brand and, if used correctly, convert people to the pages you link them to. You can also post pictures (click here for an awesome guide to well performing Instagram pictures) that represent the essence of your brand, give people a reason to want to attend your event, or simply give the viewer a feel that there is a human element behind your brand.
What you should be posting (and why):
Each media platform will be different along with each audience having distinct responses to specific information. Fortunately, there are some things that we can agree on when it comes to what you should post to get results.
According to Bizzabo (a business and event coordinating app) via Medium, adding information to help spread the word about your brand or event, i.e buzz words, the correct category, and location of the event, is key to making you easy to come across. Another critical area is cross promoton, Bizzabo believes working with a partner to “co-host” an event is advantageous. With the use of a partner, you can double your bandwidth and hopefully your attendees…that is, if you choose your partner wisely (AKA one with connections and credibility).
For Facebook specifically, Sam Ho, CEO of UpOut, explains how using Facebook to promote your events can be crucial. This technique can also be applied to general brand promotion.
His four main points include:
- Using an aesthetically pleasing cover photo for your event
- Driving RSVPS
- Use of all channels to promote
- Getting people engaged in order to promote your event and maximize attendance
Why is everyone using the pound symbol these days?
Relating back to the introduction of this post, seeking out your competitors and identifying what they are doing can be extremely rewarding. This plays a large role when it comes to hashtags. If a company or event similar to yours is using a list of hashtags, those are the hashtags that you should be using. Hashtags have shown continuous benefits within Twitter and Instagram.
What happens after you post?
If you are reaching the correct individuals for what you are promoting, your social media platforms will begin to gain credibility.
Credibility, along with the correct people seeing your product, can be extremely helpful. You are not going to attend an event if no one else is going and you most likely wouldn’t seek out a company you found through Facebook if they had no likes or social presence associated with them. In contrast, if there is a mass of people attending an event or a company with a great deal of likes, the probability of one’s interest is widely increased.
The Take Home:
It’s free, effective, and everyone is doing it. The use of social media is only growing so hop on the bandwagon, find your #hashtags, and start hyper targeting your audience now.
