Photo by Jazmin Million

In the first piece we looked at a few ways to get your events listed on popular event sharing sites to optimize the events visibility. In this post we are going to look at a few ways to promote your event and interact with the participants before they are blown away at your event. Let’s jump right in.

Create a Hashtag

The easiest way to track activities online about your event is to use a universal hashtag for your event. This hashtag can be used on Twitter, within Flickr photos and even on blog posts with the tags area. Using a hashtag you can set up searches on Twitter Search, Google Alerts and other services to be notified when someone is talking about your event. It also allows your guests to track conversations about your event to see what is going on, get updates and other notifications.

When setting up a hashtag you want to be sure to use something short and easy to remember that relates to your event. Affiliate Summit, who just had their big event in Las Vegas used the hashtag #asw10 to signify Affiliate Summit West 2010. This will help them distinguish it from their other shows – Affiliate Summit East and the year it took place. Below is a picture of a result when searching for #ASW10 on Twitter:

Blog About It

One of the key marketing tactics to gain attention for your event is to talk about it. You do this online by blogging. When blogging about your event be sure to add value to your readers and stay away from I and me sentences. When you have something fun to announce about the event, tell your readers how it will impact them and make their experience better.

At a recent job fair in Orlando, FL we were working with the Orlando Employment Guide to make their event more interactive. To do this we added a live presentation on using video to enhance your personal brand and then added a “video blog creation station” where we would shoot an introductory video blog for the first 50 people that signed up. On the blog post announcing we focused on the benefits to the attendee and even shot example videos to help them prepare.

Lastly we directed them to the pre-register link with a strong call to action. The goal with all the blogging is to get more and more people seeing the event which drives our pre-registrations.

Leverage Local Community Leaders

Taking blogging to the next level is to get other local bloggers and influential people involved in your event promotion. There are a few ways to do this. The first is by developing relationships with local bloggers and getting them to blog about your event. The second way is to write a guest post for them and have them post it before the event. With both of these tactics you want to be sure to have them provide a link back to your pre-registration page.

Another way to utilize this tactic is to invite local photographers and video people to your event and give them free reign to have a great time and shoot whatever they want. Instruct them that you have a hashtag and to use that when they post anything online. This will help you track it. Inviting a few photographers from the local community will cause them to promote the event via their sites and give you plenty of content to use after the event.

A good way to find these creative people is through sites like Flickr, where you can search by location and reach out to them via that network or find them on Twitter or another network. For a recent Rock For Hunger concert we used this tactic and came away with an amazing video, plus Jeff, the man behind the camera kept posting messages to his Facebook and Twitter profile before, during and after the event which led to more opportunities for the organization we were working with to connect and reach out.

Other Promotional Ideas

There are endless ways to promote your event online and through social media. One of the most high impact is through video. Record videos at the venue, talking about the event, revealing surprise speakers and so much more. Post the videos to YouTube and take the embed code and place it everywhere. Use the share functionality on event sites to broadcast to all your social networks for a high return impact. Even think about placing ads on sites like Facebook where you can really target the demographic you want to come to your event.

What are some ideas and tactics that you have? I’d love to hear in the comments.

This post was written by Greg Rollett a music markting consultant and social media marketer from Orlando, FL.

Tags: event marketing, guest blogging, hashtag, Social Media, Twitter