Saffire Blog

5 Tips for Running a Successful Facebook Contest

Facebook recently announced that they’ve changed the requirements for running promotions on their site, making it even easier to administer contests for your event’s fans. They’ve removed the requirement to use a third-party app, and now allow entries to be collected via comments and “likes” on your page posts as well as using “likes” as … Continue reading “5 Tips for Running a Successful Facebook Contest”

Facebook recently announced that they’ve changed the requirements for running promotions on their site, making it even easier to administer contests for your event’s fans. They’ve removed the requirement to use a third-party app, and now allow entries to be collected via comments and “likes” on your page posts as well as using “likes” as a tool for voting on your page. With these changes in mind, here are 5 tips for running a successful Facebook contest.

SET GOALS: As you prepare your Facebook contest, consider what you’re trying to achieve prior to getting started. For many events you’ll be looking to gain interactions on your Facebook wall including Likes, Shares and Comments. All of these interactions not only increase the awareness of your event as fans spread the word to their friends exponentially growing your audience, but they also have an impact on your site’s search engine results. If increased Facebook interactions is your goal, then the new promotions rules will be perfect for you as you ask your fans to either “Like” or “Comment” on a post to enter for their chance to win. This will be especially helpful in the weeks leading up to your event as you create a fever-pitch of anticipation and excitement.
However, if your goal is to increase your newsletter distribution and you want to collect email addresses as part of the promotion, you may still want to consider using a third-party app to help administer the contest. Keep in mind the more information you require the greater the barrier to entry. Requiring your customers to enter personal data will decrease your response rate, but that may be a calculated decision in an effort to collect more valuable data. Consider this tactic after your event is over and you’ve created even more loyal fans willing to take that extra step.

CONSIDER YOUR AUDIENCE – Think about who your event appeals to and how you’d like to attract that audience. This will be important when determining the prize package to ensure it garners a response, but it also may effect the times that you post about your contest. According to Zephoria, highest traffic on Facebook occurs mid-week between 1:00 & 3:00, while Thursdays and Fridays have much greater engagement; but you want to reach your fans specifically. Facebook has improved their reporting of data on your page, and this information should be utilized when running promotions. By clicking “See All” in the “Insights” box at the top of any Facebook page that you administer, you will find a wealth of information regarding your posts and what your fans are responding to. The default view is the “Overview” tab but by selecting the “Posts” tab, and the “When Your Fans Are Online” option you’ll see both a chart of days of the week as well as times of day that your fans are on Facebook.

Click for more information on using your Facebook insight data.

DETERMINE THE CONTEST TIME FRAME – In a recent study by Wisemetrics, a post had about 2.5 hours to reach 75% of its maximum impressions. However, Facebook has recently announced a new change called “Story Bump,” which pushes posts back into fans’ timelines if the post received a lot of interactions, giving your posts a slightly longer life span if your audience is engaged. This is great news for marketers as each Like and Comment entry to win increases the odds that even more people will see the post in their news feed. With this quick engagement, fans typically expect a similarly quick turn-around in results. Consider running a new contest each day in the weeks leading up to your event. A single post that asks fans to vote for their favorite attraction, food item or musician by the end of the day for a chance to win a prize package should garner a quick surge of engagement, and by continuing to run similar daily contests you’ll keep fans checking back to your page on a routine basis.
For more in-depth contests that ask people to submit personal information, consider a longer time frame with multiple posts reminding users to enter to win, over the course of a week or two.
Read more about Story Bump here.

CREATE A PRIZE PACKAGE – As event and venue coordinators you have a unique advantage in having access to lots of things that people really want. Individual tickets, multi-day passes, VIP access, concessions or ride vouchers and merchandise are just a few options to consider that would come at a low cost to you with a potentially high return in Facebook fan engagement. Keep in mind the level of interaction you’re asking of the fan and let the prize package reciprocate their effort. Asking fans to Like or Comment is quick and easy and the prizes can be smaller to reflect that. If you’re requesting more information, offer a larger and more desirable package to encourage fan engagement.

PLAN THE FULFILLMENT – This final step is often overlooked, but is crucial for maintaining your fan loyalty. Knowing how you will quickly deliver the prize to the winner will prevent the possibility of turning an elated Facebook fan into an angry Facebook fan. Consider the size of the prize, shipping or pick-up options, and timing of contest compared to prize’s expiration date.

Top 5 Must-Haves for Your Event’s Mobile Site

This summer has been jam-packed with amazing events to attend. Between the conferences, festivals, rodeos and fairs, I’ve come to realize one thing is certain…a mobile source of information for ANY event is crucial for customers to experience full enjoyment! But it’s not just personal experience that points to that. Studies continuously show that the number of consumers accessing information from their phones is on the rise, and according to MediaPost, a recent study by Adobe Digital Index showed more specifically that 70% of respondents searched their phones for local information (such as event times, weather, maps, and reviews).

With that in mind, here are the Top 5 Must-Haves for Your Mobile Site. Trust me; your customers will thank you for it.

How to get to your event – Few things are less frustrating than wanting to attend an event but not knowing exactly how to get there. Large events cause a lot of confusion even for a local audience who may already be familiar with your exact location, but aren’t sure of road closures, parking or public transit options. Your physical address is extremely important to include so customers can punch it directly into their mobile maps, but don’t forget the details. Clearly state the preferred routes to get to the designated parking locations, and include the reasonable options for walk-up, bicycle, and public transportation traffic.
A robust schedule – If you’re an event with lots of activities occurring over a course of time, be sure your customers can easily find the dates, times and locations for each of those individual activities from the only source of information they will have on them (their phone). I attended an event recently where there was much confusion over where and when things were happening. A friend pulled out their phone and said let me check my schedule, and I exclaimed, “You found a mobile schedule? Where?” and he turned his phone around to reveal a photo he had taken of his hand-written notes of the events he wanted to attend that day. I was so disappointed! Don’t make your customers do the leg work themselves because you’ll lose the vast majority of them.
Ticket purchasing – According to Internet Retailer, US mobile sales are up, and this means big opportunities for events of all sizes and types. Consumers are increasingly comfortable making purchases via their mobile devices, and your event or venue should be taking advantage of this trend. Not only does it guarantee increased revenue via advance ticket sales, but it also provides your customers with the convenience they’re growing accustomed to.
Social interaction – Earlier this month, Facebook announced that 78% of their users are visiting their site from mobile devices. Social media is a great way for your fans to access and share your event or venue’s information, so make it easy for them to find you on Facebook, Twitter and any other social networks that you participate in via their mobile devices.
Email signup – Lastly, provide your customers with an option to get more information from you throughout the year. It will help them stay connected with your brand, and as mobile email activity continues to grow, you will remain present in your fans’ minds even after your event has passed.

Reaching your customers wherever they are and giving them real time information on the go will build your brand’s credibility, and your fans will love you for it!

5 Social Media Goals for Your Next Event

As the summer event season starts to kick into high gear, we know it can be a little daunting to keep up with the latest social media trends to keep your event fresh and relevant as it competes for your customers’ attention this summer. Here are 5 goals you should try to accomplish this event season. … Continue reading “5 Social Media Goals for Your Next Event”

1) Ensure your social media links are clearly displayed on your website. As people search for information about your event or venue they will inevitably find themselves on your site. Make it easy for them to link seamlessly between that and your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram accounts, etc. Use the standard icons that are easily recognizable by almost everyone, and display them prominently near the top of every page.

2) Create a specific #hashtag for your event and encourage your volunteers, performers, sponsors, student organizations (4-H, FFA, etc.), scholarship winners, and any supporters to use it as often as possible. #Hashtags are now used in Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, allowing customers to see all content that shares that same unique identifier. This makes it easy to find everything being said about your event with a simple click.

3) Give Instagram a try. I know what you’re thinking, “not another account to keep track of,” but as Instagram gains popularity with teens and young adults it’s a great way to get visual content from your event or venue out there to generate excitement and desire to attend. Perhaps more importantly, it easily sends images & videos to your Facebook & Twitter accounts so posting to Instagram can automatically generate content for your other social media sites at the same time. And, it’s actually pretty fun! Just keep in mind everything crops to a true square shape, so leave some space on the edges of your pictures to allow for cropping.

4) Take some videos! According to MarketingProfs, 76% of marketers say they plan to use online video but only 23% of national brands are actually currently acting on it. With smartphones today, taking videos couldn’t be easier, and with apps like Vine and Instagram, sharing these videos on your social media sites is a breeze! For some quick video tips, check out Social Media Examiner’s suggestions for Instagram Video.

5) Keep the conversation alive! You probably have your smartphone on you at all times, right? So there’s really no excuse to not interact with your customers where they are already spending their time. Set up your event’s social media accounts on your phone to be able to quickly answer questions and comments and to post photos, videos and news throughout your event. While it’s often difficult to calculate the actual ROI on social media, it’s hard to deny that establishing a personal connection with your customers will increase their loyalty with your event.

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram Adding New Tools

Twitter adds Analytics to Track Performance (and it’s free) Twitter has had analytics for any advertising that you may have done on their platform, but now they have opened up those tools for use with your regular tweets and to look at your followers in more depth. To access the analytics, go to ads.twitter.com – … Continue reading “Facebook, Twitter and Instagram Adding New Tools”

Twitter adds Analytics to Track Performance (and it’s free)

Twitter has had analytics for any advertising that you may have done on their platform, but now they have opened up those tools for use with your regular tweets and to look at your followers in more depth.

To access the analytics, go to ads.twitter.com – the advertising platform on twitter. Login using your Twitter account login. You will click on the Analytics tab on the left part of the navigation. You can select either Timeline Activity or Followers. (Followers only provides information when you have a large enough group of followers.) Selecting Timeline Activity displays a dashboard like this:

You can choose to view All, Best or Good. Best shows you the top 15% of tweets with some level of engagement within the date range you are viewing. Good shows the top 66% of tweets with some level of engagement within the date range.

You can now easily gauge referrals now since the tool shows you how many people clicked on a link in your tweet. You can even download the data as a CSV file to track behavior over a longer period of time and use it to build compare with other tools and data.

As Twitter continues to figure out ways to make money with advertising and other options, I’m certain that the analytics will get more extensive, but this at least gives a nice, easy way to track performance and help determine engagement with your tweets. And best of all, it’s free.

Facebook introduces Hashtags

Facebook has stated that they will be rolling out more features to help surface the larger conversations and topics that people are talking about. The first of these will be the use of hashtags.

Thankfully if you have already been using hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc., you will just continue those same efforts now on Facebook. They will be used the same way to add context to your post or indicate that it is part of a larger conversation. (If you haven’t started using hashtags, see our blog post, Hashtags – They’re not just for breakfast anymore, to help you get started.)

According to Facebook you can:

Search for a specific hashtag from your search bar. For example, #NBAFinals.
Click on hashtags that originate on other services, such as Instagram.
Compose posts directly from the hashtag feed and search results.

As always, you control the audience for your posts, including those with hashtags.

As an event marketer, the benefits are that you now can begin to see similarities and differences in the behaviors around your conversations across all of your primary social media efforts. #lovesimplification

Instagram adds Video Functionality

Instagram launched an update for their app which now includes video support. The new feature allows you to take video from 3 seconds to a maximum of 15 seconds, apply filters similar to how you have always done with photos and share out on Instagram and other social site. Another cool feature is built-in image stabilization to take out the jitters from moving your cell phone around. You can select a still image from within your video to represent it rather than being stuck with just the first frame.

We had mentioned Vine, Twitter’s 6 second video sharing service, a while back. This is Facebook/Instagram’s competitive response. With as popular as Instagram has become, I’m sure this will take off like crazy.

Techcrunch put together a nice comparison on Vine and Instagram:

The great thing for events is that rather than adding yet another social site, you simply can start sharing more rich content with the same services that you likely have been focused on.

6 Key Metrics to Track with Pinterest’s New Analytics

One of the best things about working with events is seeing all the fantastic photos from each event. It truly makes you feel like you are at the event while visiting the website. As we have touched on before, Pinterest can be another fantastic way to showcase your event photos and attract potential customers. Mom’s … Continue reading “6 Key Metrics to Track with Pinterest’s New Analytics”

One of the best things about working with events is seeing all the fantastic photos from each event. It truly makes you feel like you are at the event while visiting the website. As we have touched on before, Pinterest can be another fantastic way to showcase your event photos and attract potential customers. Mom’s love Pinterest, and as we can all agree, control the pocket-book in many families. So even though you should keep your razor-sharp focus on Facebook in your social media efforts, it might pay to spend a little time making sure your Pinterest page is up to snuff.

Pinterest now has over 49 million users who spend an average of 14.9 minutes per visit to the site. That’s a lot of time checking out, curating and organizing photos and ideas! By having great photos on your website and Pinterest page, Pinterest continues to be a great way to showcase your event and drive traffic to your website.

As you may have heard Pinterest recently announced the addition of analytics to their site. This gives you an easier way to determine the impact of your images on your website and the contribution of Pinterest users to your traffic. To get started, you’ll need to convert your account to a business account in order to access the analytics dashboard. Go to business.pinterest.com. It is very easy to convert. Just need to make sure that you input some basic information and description. Likely you already did this when you set up your site the first time. (Company UserName, About You Section, Reference Link, Differentiate your Pin Boards) Only slightly tricky step is verifying your website. Go to Settings >> Click Verify Website>> Download HTML Verification >> Upload this to your webserver in a subfolder (super simple for your tech person) >> Click “Click Here” on the verification screen (once code has been uploaded). Once verified, then Pinterest analytics begins tracking what is being pinned from your website. You will see a check mark next to your site name and you will have the option to select analytics from the dropdown menu.

Once verified you see the check mark next to your URL and have analytics as an option in the dropdown.

Key Metrics to Watch:

Pins from your site (Site Metrics tab) – Informs you of the daily average number of pins from your verified website. Helps to determine whether the visual content is interesting enough for your visitors to pin to your boards.
Repins from your site (Site Metrics tab) – Informs you of the daily average number of pins from your website that were repinned. Helps to determine whether your visual content is resonating with your Pinterest audience. Repins give your content a chance to be seen by people that don’t follow you directly.
Reach – (Site Metrics tab) – Informs you of the success of your content. Helps you understand how large an audience your content reached for branding purposes and as a comparison to how much traffic did or did not generate to your website.
Visitors/Visits to your website – (Site Metrics tab) – Clicks is visits to your website and Visitors is the total number of people who visited your website. Some pins drive engagement on Pinterest and others will drive traffic to your website. You want engagement on both. Comparing Clicks to Repins helps determine what types of action your different content helps to drive.
Most Repinned – (Most Repinned tab) – Informs you what content is resonating with your audience the most. This tab shows actual pins that were repinned for that specific date range. Look for patterns in your content which will help you determine what types of content to create in the future. Try new things and experiment; then use the report to see if it was successful.
Most Clicked – (Most Clicked tab) – Informs you what content drives the most traffic to your website. If you are selling online, this could help you to understand the potential to generate revenue from Pinterest (concerts, merch, etc. ) Helps determine if the Pin It button on your website is driving your visitors to pin specific images to their boards.

All of these are easily accessed from the dashboard that Pinterest provides.

By watching your Pinterest analytics, you’ll gain insight into what types of content is resonating with your customers which can help guide you on providing more of what they like. As with any of the tools in your marketing toolbox, Pinterest Analytics now gives you one more tool to help you determine how your website content is performing.

5 Tips to Drive E-commerce Sales for Your Event

Whether you just wound down your event or only beginning the hard work preparing for this year’s, today is always the day to be thinking about e-commerce. If your event just ended, you might be able to capture extra merchandise sales that help capture the memories. If you’re just ramping up, start thinking strategically about the … Continue reading “5 Tips to Drive E-commerce Sales for Your Event”

Whether you just wound down your event or only beginning the hard work preparing for this year’s, today is always the day to be thinking about e-commerce. If your event just ended, you might be able to capture extra merchandise sales that help capture the memories. If you’re just ramping up, start thinking strategically about the best time to start selling tickets and this year’s signature items. To jump-start your efforts, we’ve pulled together 5 tips to help you drive more revenue with e-commerce.

1) Create a sense of urgency

Create special bundles of items or a limited-time discounts, so you can tap into your customers’ sense that they may be missing out on something if they don’t take action (e.g., for a limited time, offer free parking with event tickets). Use retail as your guide here. They often have repeated sales, sometimes with a little twist, to keep eyes on their offerings. These don’t just happen. Create an editorial calendar that includes promotions throughout the year.

2) Mobile – If your site isn’t mobile friendly, you are losing sales

Use your smartphone or tablet to purchase something from your website. How was the experience? Would you buy from your site? Make sure you have a touch-friendly user experience. Get rid of the Flash and minimize how much the customer has to type. Consumers must be able to easily interact with your site no matter where they are. If not, consumers will lose patience and you will lose a sale. Picture it this way – we use computers during the day, tablets on the sofa in the evening and we always have our smartphones on us. Internet Retailer reports that M-Commerce sales were up 82% in 2012 and they will rise another 56.5% in 2013. Even though mobile doesn’t represent a huge percentage of sales now, it’s only going UP!

3) Email everyone that bought something last year

Thank them for being your customer in 2012, and highlight anything that is new this year, potentially including a promotion to reward their loyalty (e.g., special pre-sale privileges or discounts). Train your customers to know they will get the latest and best info by signing up for your email. Facebook and Twitter are also obviously important ways to get information out, but don’t spend all your time there at the expense of email, which will create your highest revenue days of the year.

4) Make it social

The audiences you get in your online store are active on social networking sites. (Nearly everyone on the internet is on some social platform.) They use social media to share and recommend things they are currently excited about, including things they buy. And for most, if they are making a purchase, then they’ve gotten excited enough to open their wallets. Consider posting exclusive promotions just for your fans or followers. Encourage them to interact by posing questions to get the conversation started.

5) Give your customers the choice of how to get their tickets

You’ve optimized your website for the best experience, insured that your site works great on mobile, streamlined purchasing to make it as easy as possible, and added social links to encourage sharing.But how do you deliver tickets? Make it just as easy to get tickets as it is to buy from you by allowing your customers to print their tickets at home. Not only do you “Wow!” your customers and give them instant gratification on their purchase, you’ll save money. Fulfilling advanced ticket orders in-house, whether by mail or will call, can be expensive and time consuming. In addition to hardware and paper stock expenses, fulfillment requires your event to devote staff resources to print, sort, and mail tickets to each of your customers. Leary of fraud? With the right application and bar-code scanners (like SaffireScan just introduced from Saffire), you can verify not only the validity of a ticket, but also eliminate counterfeit tickets by including a unique code on each ticket.

Each of these tips can make its own impact, but as you use them together, you’ll have the best chance of increasing online sales.

Happy Endings: After the Board Meeting

Most events have board of directors. And boards have meetings. Some of them are tough. The tougher they are, the more important it becomes to end meetings well. So even though Saffire specializes in online marketing, today we’re stepping away from the computer and sharing 6 tips for what to do when the meeting’s over. … Continue reading “Happy Endings: After the Board Meeting”

Most events have board of directors. And boards have meetings. Some of them are tough.

The tougher they are, the more important it becomes to end meetings well. So even though Saffire specializes in online marketing, today we’re stepping away from the computer and sharing 6 tips for what to do when the meeting’s over.

It’s not so much about ending the meeting. It’s what to do when the meeting is over.

This one is obvious. You shake hands. You smile. But here’s the key. Smile and shake hands in a way that suggests you are 30% happier with the outcome than you actually are.
If it was tough, acknowledge it. Say this was hard, and I’m happy we dealt with it. This gives everybody an understanding that it was hard on everyone. Plus it gets the elephant out in the room. (I’m a big fan of that.)
Establish common ground about anything, even if you couldn’t in the meeting. Talk about anything except what you just met about. Talk about something personal and above all, neutral. Before you physically move on, establish that you’ve moved on from the topic.
Who do you talk to? Engage anyone who for whatever reason didn’t participate much. It’s a nice thing to do and fulfills the purpose of the meeting, to get everyone involved.
The main message to communicate is gratitude. No matter what, find something to be grateful about the meeting. Again, 30% more positive than you feel.
This one is the toughest for me. Don’t take the last doughnut. Step away from the doughnut. OK come to think of it, go ahead and take it. We won’t judge!

(We were originally inspired to cover this topic by an article in Entrepreneur, but we had thoughts too, so we made it our own.)

The Ever-changing World of Twitter and Facebook

Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with the fast pace of changes in the social media world. This week we thought we would let you know about a few that are here now and some that are in the process of rolling out. Vine Twitter has inspired us to creatively speak in 140 characters or … Continue reading “The Ever-changing World of Twitter and Facebook”

Vine

Twitter has inspired us to creatively speak in 140 characters or less; now they have launched Vine which is teaching us to deliver creative looping video with only 6 secs! My first reaction was like most: “How can you show anything in 6 seconds?” Well remember that it’s pretty exciting and a lot of things can happen in the 8 seconds a cowboy is riding a bull. I don’t believe this will replace your efforts with YouTube content, but there will likely be a growing amount of times where just a little video shows things off better than a photo. It can be quirky, fun and offer little windows into your event and life in the event industry. The service has taken off among celebrities, actors, comedians and Twitter iOS users who share clips, skits, stop-motion and increasingly creative videos.

To get started:

1. Download and install the Vine app from iTunes for your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. Sorry, no Android support yet.

2. Create a Vine account using your Twitter profile or email address.

3. Find people to follow by going to your profile and clicking the People icon at the top right of your screen. You can also go to your settings and use the Find People option under Friends.

4. Connect your Facebook account to share videos on Facebook as well (personal profiles only).

5. Click the video camera icon to start recording videos. Tap your finger on the screen to record and release to stop recording. 6. When you’re finished, click Continue to share your video on Vine, Twitter and Facebook.

As of March 31, you can even embed the video into your blog or website easily from the app.

Try it out – deliver quick experiences, build excitement, and share the moments of your event.
https://vine.co/v/bDVpIUFww9r

This is the Easter Name-That-Tune Contest Vine that Dorito’s ran. (Mouse over it and click it to get it to start. You’ll need to click the speaker icon to turn on sound. By default, Vines load with the sound off the first time.)

Facebook Graph Search

Graph Search is Facebook’s new way to let you search for connections to people and places. In other words, Facebook has taken all of the data that people have entered and put a searchable context around it. Previously when you entered a search term in Facebook, it would show you any Pages for that term, People with the term in their name, any Places that’s name was that term, and then offer to search the web. Now you will have the ability to add some context to your searches with terms like: “Friends that like,” “People who like,” “Photos of.” Basically you can use natural language to search with rather than specific terms.

As this grows and Facebook improves it, this feature will become more and more important to local businesses since you will be able to quickly search for a type of business and see which of your friends like it and any other feedback on the business. It certainly places a new emphasis on building Facebook profiles for all of your business’ brands and locations; adding to that the importance of enticing your customer base to ‘like’ you on Facebook. To prepare and improve your event for Graph Search there are a few easy steps to take: 1) Add key information to your About, Mission, and Company Description sections Make sure you include your URL and a good description of your event. Include important keywords that search engines like. Include your phone number and physical address in the Basic Info section.

2) Customize your Facebook URL By default, Facebook will give you a URL that includes a number. It will look something like this: facebook.com/pages/yourbizname/123123123. You need a minimum of 25 Likes to before you can change it to something like: facebook.com/yourbizname. To make the change, go to Facebook Username. 3) Encourage Sharing Not a new concept, but insure that your posts, photos, video, contests, etc. are things that your customers will want to share. The more that things are shared, the further that your site will spread across the “graph” and be found by others. Just as before Graph Search, remember that Facebook is all about connecting with people. The update has been rolling out for about a month or so; some people have it and others are still waiting. It will be interesting to watch how customers adapt to searching in Facebook.

Facebook News Feed

In the next few weeks, Facebook will be releasing a new look to your News Feed. The revision will make the News Feed cleaner, emphasize photos, and allow Facebook users greater control to customize their experience. Photos and mobile are the emphasis for Facebook since 50% of News Feed posts now contain a photo; up 25% from 2011. As mobile phone’s cameras continue to improve, sharing photos and videos are become even more of the focus on people’s Facebook posts.

Today you have the choice of viewing your News Feed by Top Stories or Most Recent. You can setup a few limited separate feeds for Close Friends or Friends from your college, but with very little customization. With the new revision, you will have much more control over what you see. They liken it to a personalized newspaper. Like a newspaper, the News Feed will feature a prominent ‘front page’ divided into a variety of new sections. Featured, in a menu, will be the option to filter your feed to receive content only from specific sources. These options include: All Friends, Music, Photos, Games, Close Friends, Following and any of your Interest lists. The Following sub-segment is what is most interesting for events. This is where people will be able to access information from pages they are following; which is mainly business pages, celebrity pages, and news.

The ability for the user to view just the news updates from pages they are following should give events and businesses more visibility. It will also place more importance on creating content that is engaging. Failure to keep the users engaged will result in the limited use of the ‘Following’ sub-segment of the News Feed and will result in dramatically less visibility and consequently traffic to event pages. With the better quality and highlighting of images, images will become more important to garnering user attention and generating traffic. This change will favor events able to create enticing, striking images able to better grab attention. Additionally, with the segmentation of News Feed, sponsored stories may become more important and more targeted as people will be able to navigate to specific News Feeds based on any of their interests.

Continue Practicing the Basics

Even with all the changes, the basics of social media with Twitter and Facebook really haven’t changed – deliver content relevant to your audience, use photos and videos to encourage engagement and sharing, and continue to realize that these are tools in the marketing toolbox that can be leveraged across your various efforts. Events, by their nature, have an advantage because there are so many things that people enjoy and experience when they are there in person and crave seeing when they are online. Now you have a few new tools to deliver those experiences online.

5 Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Your Event

Chances are that you’re already using social media as part of your marketing toolkit. Here you’ll find 5 ways to increase odds on having a spectacular event. 1) Create buzz with a contest Any type of free giveaways get people excited and scrambling to get in on the action. Contests are a great way to … Continue reading “5 Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Your Event”

Chances are that you’re already using social media as part of your marketing toolkit. Here you’ll find 5 ways to increase odds on having a spectacular event.

1) Create buzz with a contest

Any type of free giveaways get people excited and scrambling to get in on the action. Contests are a great way to generate interest in your event and get people talking about it.

Recently Rodeo Houston targeted the younger audience with a contest promoting their Demi Lovato concert.

Participants only needed to say where Demi was born (and spell it correctly). The winner got two chute tickets to Demi Lovato’s concert at Rodeo Houston, plus the chance to meet Demi Lovato backstage. Also, Carnival tickets, a steak dinner for two before the Rodeo, two season passes to the grounds and a parking pass. Now that’s a serious prize package!

As Leroy Shafer, chief operating officer of Rodeo Houston, said, “these entertainers introduce rodeo to a new generation that will stay with us for generations to come.”

Create a hashtag to easily track your entries on twitter and use a similar phrase on Facebook. Keep the requirements super-simple to encourage participation.

2) Create a video that people will share

A video is the next best thing to experiencing your event in person. Great visuals and sound will not only get people excited to attend, but also will get them motivated to share their excitement.

Make a video (and remember, it doesn’t have to be slick – just take it with your phone!), and leverage it everywhere you can. Post it on YouTube, Facebook and on your own site.

We aren’t sure if this was truly done by a fan or someone at the Los Angeles County Fair, but it’s unique, clever and catchy , proving that even slightly annoying things catch on with repetition.

Some Things I Saw At The 2012 Los Angeles County Fair

3) Interview Performers or Guests for Special Content

One of the main reasons people attend your event is to see your performers – rodeo cowboys & cowgirls, famous singers or even the chef at a crowd favorite fair food cart. Getting more exposure is one of the primary reasons that they are performing at your event.

So take advantage of this by doing a short interview with your performers, and this will be valuable event content. Here’s an example:

Trevor Brazile talking about the prestige of the Pendleton Round-Up

Again, leverage the content everywhere – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and your own site.

4) Create a “Great Tips” post for your blog

Help your guests organize their day by creating a post with tips about your event. Highlight the “Don’t Miss It” attractions. Suggest ways to avoid the crowds for the most popular attractions. Let them know helpful information about any event changes; for instance, you have now moved several kiddie rides over near the petting barn rather than everything being in the midway. (If you have a Saffire site, your guests can use all of this information to customize their own event schedule right on your site.)

Encourage your visitors to contribute their own tips. Make sure it’s easy for them to share this great content on Facebook and Twitter.

5) Create a tweet for your attendees

If people are excited about attending, why not make it easy for them to tell their friends by just clicking a button. You can create a custom Twitter button with your specific message already set up in the Tweet text. Here is the link to Twitter’s Button resource. Once you’ve built it, you embed the HTML code that Twitter provides.

These are just 5 Ways to promote your event with Social Media. Be creative and try out your own ideas. One of the great things about social media is that you never can predict what will catch everyone’s attention and go viral. Just keep the content flowing.