Social Media Optimization For Dummies

Chapter 12

Enriching Events with Social Media

In This Chapter

• Managing pre-event promotions
• Building community around your event
• Employing real-time social media promotions
• Embracing fan-created content

Social media and events go together extremely well. Any time you bring together a group of people for a common purpose, be it education, business, or just plain fun, you have a community, and a social media community is a great way to enrich and enliven an event.

Although you may associate social media with big festivals, it's also a great match for smaller events. You can implement social media optimization (SMO) in several ways, not only to make your event marketing more effective, but also to increase participant satisfaction. The best part? Handling social media for events is great fun! It brings together all the best parts of social media: easy user engagement, awesome content, and genuine buzz.

Generating Pre-Event Buzz

Pre-event marketing largely focuses on selling the event, and that's only natural. It should also be concerned with setting the tone for your event, however. So much of the success of an event, from sales to user satisfaction, comes from creating the appropriate tone. Are you promoting a sporting event? You need to build a sense of competition and excellence. Are you promoting a multiple-day festival? You need to build a sense of excitement and anticipation for the tribe. Are you building attendance for a business training seminar? The mood needs to reflect ...