3 Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Your Event

3 Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Your Event

As a business owner, you’re most likely using social media to promote your company, products, or services but you can also use social networks to promote events. Whether you’re in the business of producing events or you’re hosting or sponsoring an event, consider developing a social media plan as part event promotions.

Here are three ways that social media can enhance your event promotion.

1. Pre-event promotions and ticket sales

While you can promote your events on any social network through posts or ads, both Facebook and LinkedIn let you create free event pages along with boosting opportunities to pay for more visibility. While you could list your event on both, keep in mind the distinct audiences on each network. LinkedIn is most appropriate for events for professionals while Facebook reaches a more general audience.

Even with those audience distinctions, there is nothing wrong with listing your event in both places. Both event page platforms also let you promote either an online event or an offline event. If you are selling tickets, you can link directly to your ticket ordering website from the event page.

In addition to posting about your event to the top social networks, there are some other social sites you can use to promote it. Nextdoor is a hyperlocal, neighborhood-specific platform where you can create a business presence and add event listings. Meetup is a social networking site for group gatherings and in-person and virtual events. There are also event sites with social features you can use such as Eventbrite and Evvnt that include marketing and ticketing features.

2. Live Posting and Streaming

If you are hosting an online event, you can live stream it and record it at the same time then leverage that footage later. If you are hosting an offline event, you can post to social media live throughout the duration of the event to garner attention and expand your reach beyond the attendees. You can post photos in real-time or live stream video and share what is happening at your event with your social media followers.

Posting live from an event works best on social networks where it is acceptable to post frequently. You typically would not want to publish multiple posts over a short period of time to your main Facebook or Instagram feeds; however, you can post frequently to both Instagram and Facebook Stories.

To make posting live more efficient on those two Meta-owned social networks, make sure your Facebook Page is added to your Instagram account before your event begins and allow cross-posting. By doing this, each time you post a Story to your Instagram account it will automatically publish to Facebook Stories as well.

X and TikTok are two social networks where it is common and acceptable to post multiple times to the main feed and both provide video livestreaming capabilities as do Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

3. Post Event Wrap Ups

Once your event is over, take time to curate the content you produced live in order to compose a wrap up post. You can publish a wrap up post to any or all of the social networks you typically use. There are several types of posts you can use to share scenes from the event including an album on Facebook and LinkedIn and a carousel on Instagram.

You may opt to produce a compilation video from footage you captured live or make a video montage of photographs or even a combination of both. You can add music, narration, and even captions to your event wrap up video to enhance it.

Whether you’re engaging in pre-event promotions, live posting or streaming, or recapping your event in a wrap up post, make sure to tag event co-hosts, sponsors, and other stakeholders on every post and encourage them to share what you’ve published. This kind of amplification can give you more organic views, expanding your reach exponentially.