Every now and then a broadcast tweet is acceptable – but if that’s all you’re doing you’re doing something very wrong! The key is to create audience interaction – but it’s not always obvious how to do this!
This year in the run up to New Years Eve, and with the amount of competing noise there’s going to be out there in social media land, we thought we’d come up with some tips to help you get your event a greater reach (and ultimately sell more tickets) through social media:
1. Create Profiles and Pages for your events
It might sound fairly obvious, but you, or your event promotion organisation is not what you’re selling when you’re promoting an event. So spend some time creating social media profiles for the event itself – sure your own social media profiles will be just as essential in the promotion of your event but when it comes down to it, you need to create a space for your event to have its own identity outside yours or outside the other events you’re involved with. Make sure you spread the net as well, don’t just have a Facebook page, set up a Youtube account, a Twitter account, a Google+ account, a Pinterest and Flickr account etc.
2. How to choose a hashtag for your event
Most people who know Skiddle will know that we use the hashtag #WeekendsMatter. This hashtag follows us around the various social media channels we’ve got and it’s something our users pick up on and get involved with as well. The thing about picking the right hashtag is you don’t want it triggering something else, so come up with something that’s unique and that you can own. If it’s someone else’s username for example, you’re done for – they will always come up if someone searches for that term.
3. Make booking event tickets social
Skiddle’s Facebook ticket shop is the obvious thing to think about here – it’s one of the most widely used Facebook ticket shops in the UK and helps tens of thousands of event promoters sell tickets on Facebook each month. Furthermore the frictionless timeline integrated ticket shop on Skiddle.com also helps promote events by posting the purchase of tickets to the purchaser’s timeline. Also at the point of purchase we make it really simple for people to tweet about their purchase. These things added together help ensure we maximise the reach of events promoted with Skiddle – however there are lots of options and you’ve just got to be a bit creative about it.
4. How to make the most of your event’s suppliers and partners
So you’re going to put a load of business someones way, why wouldn’t they promote your event through their social media channels on your behalf? Probably because you didn’t think about asking them! Getting your partners and suppliers involved is a really easy way to get tweets because they are already engaged and often fairly committed to making your event successful. Once they’ve agreed to do it, just drop them over the text of the tweet so they don’t have to do anything more than copy and past.
5. Create a list on Twitter and share it with your followers
Create a list on Twitter of all the people involved with your event and then share that out so other people can see if there’s anyone they’re interested in, it’s likely if you ask nicely, the people on the list will also share it from their account – which could have a dramatic impact on your event’s reach.
6. Using TweetDeck to Promote Events
At Skiddle we mainly use TweetDeck to monitor what’s happening on social media, other tools you might want to consider include HootSuite and SocialBro. These will enable you to continuously monitor Twitter (and in some cases other social media channels as well) for mentions of your event, hashtags etc or for people involved with your event, allowing you to quickly interact with the conversation whilst it’s still hot.
7. How To Use Social Media on an event website
There are loads of website plugins and widgets you can add to your website that will post your twitter content and Facebook timeline content onto your website, this is a great way to get engagement and also provides visitors to your site with the knowledge that you’re site is active.
8. Using Tracking URLs for event promotion
If you want to promote more than one event, you’re going to have to learn about what works for you and your audience and what doesn’t. One of the best ways of doing this is by creating unique URLs that track the activity on those links. This will quickly tell you what’s working in terms of generating more clicks back to your site or not. Make sure you specify which social media channel the comments are coming as well so you can track where traffic’s coming from.
If you’re clever about it you may be able to add a tracking code to your sales so you can see if your social media activities are translating to sales. You can do this on Skiddle using a tag added to the end of your URL – this can then be monitored through the Promotion Centre.
Find out how Skiddle’s social media integration can help you sell tickets to your New Year’s Eve event
New Year’s Eve 2013 is almost upon us and Skiddle’s New Year’s Eve guide is likely to be the busiest in the UK again this year. There are clear benefits in using Skiddle as your ticket sales platform from that point of view, however Skiddle’s social media integration, and especially the frictionless timeline integration we’ve got with Facebook is what will really help your social media effort multiply!
Selling tickets on Skiddle is really easy, it takes about 10 minutes to set up an account, add an event and you’ll benefit from the years of development our R&D team have put into making the Skiddle as social as possible, which is a good start! To get your event listed and tickets onsale within minutes visit: skiddle.com/promotion