Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 9 years, you’ve probably already realised that Twitter offers a great opportunity to promote events online.
Getting Started
Before you start tweeting it’s important to understand the Twitter lingo and get to grips with the different features.
1. Choose a relevant Twitter username
Your Twitter name should be easy to remember, say and type. Avoid underscores and dashes if possible because it just makes it that much harder for people to find you on Twitter. If you’ve picked a name that doesn’t reflect your brand, or has strange characters or extra numbers, don’t worry, you can change your Twitter username without losing any of your followers or updates.
Just go to your Account Settings in Twitter and change your username to something more appropriate.
2. Plan what you’re going to tweet about
Many of the most successful tweeters pick a niche or a small range of topics to tweets. This will help build your influence in specific sectors such as ‘Gigs in Birmingham’ or ‘Comedy in Edinburgh’. If you build a popular profile in your area of interest then people will know where to go when they want the latest news and information about those topics.
Other than the act of writing the content, it’s also vital to update your account regularly; it’s no good writing exceptionally good content if it only appears once a month, the same applies if you are over saturating your followers with too much content. While this may work for celebrities and other public figures, you cannot afford to irritate your followers with numerous posts that offer little value to them.
3. Which of your tweets are working?
Working out which of your tweets are the most popular can help give a good picture of what your followers would like to hear more about. As wellas keeping a note of the number of RTs or @ replies your account receives, some URL services like Bit.ly can track how many clicks an individual tweet receives.
Evvnt’s Top 10 Tips for Promoting Events On Twitter
1 . Make Twitter a part of the main event
Being active on Twitter during your event can help to increase engagement from the audience by bringing their voice into the conversation. You don’t have to be running a large scale event to make an impact, sometimes small events can encourage a greater sense of community. Consider using a Twitterfall to display live tweets from people at the venue to show feedback about the music, entertainment or speakers at your event. Services like Visible Tweets or ParaTweet offer flexible options for event organisers to display live tweets at their events.
Live tweets are a great way to connect with your audience, build followers and unite your pre-event social media activity with the main occasion. Event organisers and promoters who are active on Twitter during their events can help to increase engagement from the audience by bringing their voice into the conversation. Displaying live tweets from people at your event can help collect feedback about the music, entertainment or speakers. From festivals to football matches, motivating your event-goers to feel part of the action is a great source of free publicity.
2. Use #hashtags
Set up a #hashtag for your event and start using it to promote the event across Twitter and encourage other attendees to use it to. This is a great way to help your event attendees connect with each other and can be a useful tool to estimate your guest list too.
Hashtags are very flexible and can be used to promote your genre of music (#indie #dubstep), the location of your upcoming event (#camden, #london, #manchester), or connect with other major events happening around the world that are relevant to your business and followers (#glasto #edfringe).
3. Share photos, videos, clips and songs
Twitter can be used to share information, documents, pictures & videos of events while they’re happening – even people who aren’t attending can find out what’s going on. Without the email addresses or phone numbers of the people who are there, it’s usually the only way that organisers can stay in touch with event attendees.
Multimedia links aren’t just for Facebook. Twitter lets you share links to radio interviews, YouTube clips of live performances or SoundCloud links to the latest tracks of your artists. Users can also upload images of behind the scenes photos or flyers for upcoming events directly to the Twitter stream (see left), with services like TwitPic.
4. Connect with the acts and artists involved
If you have any high-profile acts on your lineup make sure you tweet them a ticket link or listings info and ask them to share it with their followers to help spread the word.
5. Always respond to @ replies
Twitter is not a one way information street. Make sure you are responding to anyone who asks you a question or makes a comment about your event. You would never ignore an email or phone call from an event attendee and ignoring an @ reply is the same! Replying to all your messages will show your followers that you appreciate their feedback and makes it more likely that people will keep talking about your events.
6. Follow-up with event attendees
You should try to connect with every user who RTed or shared information about your event on Twitter. It’s usually a good idea to start talking directly to your ‘power users’ (journalists, celebrities or just active social media users) to encourage them to spread the word about your event too. Events are a great way to start new relationships online that are based on a common interests.
7. Learn from your mistakes
Make sure that you listen to feedback from your Twitter followers and ask what they most enjoyed about your event. This means that you can makes changes for next time and help your event become a huge success.
8. Be relevant and regular
Don’t just spam your followers with links to gig listings or merchandise, there’s more to Twitter than trying to flog your t-shirts. Try to mix up your content instead, don’t just repeat the same message, or links, over and over again. It’s also very important to keep your content updated on a regular basis. Users are more likely to return to your account if they know that it’s updated on a regular basis.
9. Promote your Twitter account elsewhere
Always include your Twitter username and link in any mobile campaigns and promotions. Many Twitter users access Twitter from their phone so make it easy for them to connect with you on Twitter when you send them any mobile updates. You can also encourage current event attendees and fans from other networks to follow you on Twitter and help spread your content to their friends and followers too.
10. Reward your followers
Bands, artists and promoters can use Twitter as a way to offer promotions and rewards to their readers like free tickets, album or single giveaways and even free downloads. It can also be a place for breaking news about your events and to provide exclusive content for your most loyal followers. Treat your followers with behind the scenes view into the life of your event and exclusive access to popular artists involved.
For More Marketing Advice – https://evvnt.com/category/event-marketing/