10 Ways to Promote Your Ignite Talk

IgniteTalks is a fast-paced geek event that makes it easy for anyone, anywhere to learn to present their ideas and stories.

You envisioned your 5-minute story, crafted the perfect 20 slides, and rehearsed so much you could deliver it in your sleep.

You’ve spent hours creating the talk, so why not spend a half hour properly promoting it?

via Ignite Talks Madison

Here are 10 tips to pack the house with an audience who loves you:

1. RSVP to the Facebook event that your local chapter has set up. This will show up in your activity feed. Then invite your local friends so they get notifications to attend. If they RSVP “yes,” it will also serve as a calendar reminder. Now, write a great sentence describing what your talk is about and share it to your Wall with the Facebook event link.
   Example: What exactly does it mean to be an “expat”? At what point do you consider yourself one? Come to Ignite SF next Thursday and watch me talk about “10 Things I Learned While Living Abroad.”
2. Give a tip or two on your public speaking development on LinkedIn. Take a moment to introspect on the process of creating your talk. What did you learn doing it? How could this be applied in a professional setting?
3. Tweet your great sentence out to the world. Use a relevant hashtag (e.g. #Ignite[name of city]) and mention @ignitetalks for more visibility (you’ll get a retweet for sure). Or go the extra mile and make a quick video, Vine, or Periscope telling your audience giving your audience a teaser.
4. Take a “quotable quote” or big idea from your upcoming talk and add it to an image (a graphics service like Canva can help). Post it on your social networks, again using hashtags. This is a fun variation for an Instagram post, and visual posts on Twitter and Facebook generally also get more engagement.
5. Help us help you. Ignite wants your talk — and the event — to get good visibility and draw a crowd, but can’t see your day-to-day efforts. Notify your local Ignite team about your efforts, so they can also share the announcements to a broader audience and generate buzz.
6. Get in touch with other speakers slated to present at the same event and propose a “promotion swap” — you share posts about their talks, and they do the same for you to cross-pollinate across networks.
7. Contact an influencer or high-visibility contact in your community and ask if they’ll share your promotional posts. Make it easy for them by asking if they’ll just retweet or share one of your posts with a quick personal endorsement.
8. Warm up your voice — tell your coworkers, family, sports team, book club, and local barista — and anyone else you come into contact with on a regular basis. If you have routine conversations with them, they’ll likely want to come out to hear what you have to share.
9. Write a summary on the topic of your talk and post it on your blog or Medium. This will alert your existing follower base, or if you use the appropriate content tags, it will show up in relevant libraries. Again, be sure to include the link to purchase tickets.
10. Remember offline marketing! Make a flier to post at your local coffee shop or library, or create a blurb for your neighborhood events paper.

• BONUS: Do it all over again closer to the event to remind and re-motivate the last-minute planners.

via Hunting with Pixels, Ignite Talks Sydney

Other things to consider:

• Linking — The goal is to have people attend and witness your work, right? Then ALL of your messages should contain the link to register. (This is typically an Eventbrite link). We cannot stress enough how many people we’ve seen forget to include this, so their efforts promoting their talk don’t result in tickets!
• Hashtagging — Use #ignitetalks to capitalize on the greater Ignite org and #Ignite[name of city] to align with your local Ignite Talks community.
• Timing — Generally there’s no science behind when you should publish your social posts, but the three best times are: 1) when you finish your slides because you’re excited, 2) one to two weeks before the event because that’s when most of your potential audience fills their calendars, and 3) a couple days before the event (if it hasn’t yet sold out) because usually another wave of people will grab their tickets then. You could also experiment with the time of day and aim to post when you expect your network to be most active on social media, i.e; during their morning commutes, on their lunch breaks at work, or while scrolling through their feeds just before bed.

via Ignite Talks Boulder

Giving an Ignite Talk is challenging and rewarding; having a full house of familiar faces smiling back at you gives you courage and inspiration to give your absolute best performance.

Visit www.ignitetalks.io to learn more about the method, start your own chapter, or watch some interesting 5-minute videos.