Using Social Media to Create Buzz for Your Events

These days, many people are beginning to understand the potential use of social media to create event buzz. Whether the occasion is large or small, it can be enhanced tremendously through online communication.

With the popularity of social media, everything is different now. Social media allows planners and the organizations sponsoring the events the opportunity to have long-term interactions with the attendees well in advance.

Events have become much more exciting and part of that excitement is the anticipation or buzz that starts to build around the event long before it ever takes place. There are many ways to create buzz, and several of them will be discussed here.

• Intrigue your attendees: The vast majority of events have a website. However, not very many take advantage of the event management opportunities and free listings that are available to them. At the very least, you should have event pages on your website:
  • Facebook events
  • LinkedIn
  • Eventbrite.com – Eventbrite allows you to sell tickets, if that is something that you want to do
  • Meetup.com
  • Upcoming.yahoo.com

  Granted, it is a little more work to watch over all of the pages, however, it will be well worth it for you and the people who are going to your website. Additionally, another distinct advantage is that the search engines will recognize the pages and rank them.
   

• Engage your attendees: You should reach out to your potential attendees very early on. A good way to effectively accomplish this is by sending out a survey and asking for their opinions on a venue that you are considering choosing for the event, speakers that you are thinking about inviting, etc. Another way that you might want to engage your potential attendees is by asking their opinions on content topics. After you have been able to gather several topics for the content, you can ask your potential attendees to vote on the topics.
   
• Inform your attendees: It is a good idea to allow your attendees to vote on certain aspects of your event. It is a great deal more efficient and “green” than using a lot of paper. Another type of document that you can offer online is the program evaluation. There is no need to put that on paper.
   
• Integrate information: Once you are on site, you will have a wonderful opportunity to leverage social media in a really big way. The impact will be huge and people will start to buzz about what you are doing. You will need a hashtag for your event so that people who will be attending can monitor the event on Twitter. The shorter the hashtag the better. After that, you should tweet about your event, which will start to get your attendees excited and really motivated.
   
• Syndicate: You should take all of the content from the event and syndicate it as much as possible. Your ultimate goal is to entice people who did not attend your event to want to come to the next event, based on reading your content. Of course, you also want to get those people who did attend to come back next time. You can syndicate all of the event presentations as well as giving Twitter transcripts to all of the event attendees. You can also post the content on your event pages (which were discussed earlier on).
   
• Propagate: It is a great idea to take photos of your event (or have someone else take them) and upload and share them with people who were not able to attend the event. As an incentive, you can offer a prize for the best photo taken. You can also do a podcast after the event has finished and interviews of the speakers, attendees and sponsors. You should try to learn from the event to improve future events and connect with even more people as well as interacting with people who had questions for you.
   
• Blogs: Get bloggers to blog about your event and you can syndicate their blogs using a blog widget.

Conclusion

There are so many ways to create buzz about your event. The harder you work on letting people know what you will be offering and how you can involve them in some of the decisions that will go into making the event interesting, exciting, and buzz-worthy, the more positive their reactions will be and the more attendees you will gather.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.