Virtual events have gained popularity, especially post-COVID. With the world getting increasingly digital, there’s a need to make virtual events just as effective as physical events.
Social media platforms can give you a head-start. With the right social media strategies for virtual event marketing, you can successfully reach your goals, whether it’s building traffic or increasing revenue.
This post explores marketing strategies through which you can get your events to reach thousands of people in different places. Much like physical events, you’ll need proper planning, attention to detail, and a well-crafted plan in place.
However, with high competition in the digital space, your social media strategies need to be distinct. Here are a few virtual event strategies you can try out.
6 Social Media Strategies for Virtual Events
Social media platforms help you build excitement and engagement around your virtual events. If used together with your lead generation software, you’ll be well-placed to get people to sign up for your event.
Here are some strategies you can use to make the most of this marketing channel.
Create an Outstanding Event Page
This is the most important part of your event as it will introduce its purpose to your audience.
Besides being impressive, your event page should contain every important detail of your event. These include:
- Event date and time
- Agenda
- Speaker(s) bio
- Sign-up link
- Safe payment option
- Pictures
Here’s a good example of an event page on LinkedIn.
Image via LinkedIn
The page must talk about how your audience will benefit from the event and why they should register for it. Your page should also have a smooth event registration tool integrated into it and a clickable CTA button such as “attend” or “register.” This will ensure that all registrations are noted well.
You can embed videos on this page to entice your audience even further. For instance, you can create engaging snippets by combining videos from previous events using a video editor. It’s a great way to communicate everything visually and pique your audience’s interest in the event.
Choose the Best Social Media Platform(s)
Whether you’re running a paid virtual event, a brand launch, or just meeting stakeholders to declare share dividends, you need to find the right channel to reach your target audience.
It’s crucial to pick social media platforms that best fit the virtual event you’re trying to promote. Each has its own strengths you can leverage for your virtual events, such as live videos, short-form, or long-form ones.
The platform should fit your brand’s niche, and more importantly, your target audience should be active on it.
For instance, LinkedIn would be the most effective platform in terms of engagement and numbers if you’re targeting a corporate audience. Being a professional platform, you could focus your promotion there if your event is meant for people in business or tech.
Similarly, you could find the same audience on Facebook but might not get the same level of engagement. On the contrary, if you’re a B2C brand, Instagram might be your best bet as it’s an informal social platform — best to connect with consumers.
Effective reacting to messages on Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms is also a crucial to get better results.
Facebook gives you access to more users as it’s the platform with the largest number of active users. Instagram lets you experiment with visuals if your virtual event allows for it.
While you use social media platforms, don’t forget to explore niche Facebook and LinkedIn Groups that may include people who are interested in your events.
Work with Social Media Influencers
Influencer marketing helps you broaden your audience for the event as you can get exposure to the vast audience your influencers have built over the years.
This strategy can be extremely rewarding as you don’t need to go out looking for your audience. Instead, you just need to pick an influencer whose image aligns with your brand and its values. They should also have an audience similar to yours.
Once you’ve found the right influencers for promoting your event, you can ask them to start promoting it on their social media pages.
To make the promotions even more effective, you could share their posts on your pages too. This can help build even more traction for your event.
Use Hashtags
When using social media to advertise your virtual events, take advantage of hashtags to broaden your reach. You, however, need to be strategic about the hashtags you use and how you place them.
You can consider creating a branded hashtag using the best hashtag generator tools for your event and then use it in every post you publish about the event. Additionally, you can share it with your influencers. The idea is to generate traction for the hashtag to boost event visibility.
At the same time, you can look for hashtags related to the event and see if they have enough followers. By incorporating them in your posts, you can grow your reach even further organically.
For instance, on LinkedIn, a simple hashtag search would suffice. You’d be able to know how many people follow that hashtag and gauge its popularity.
If you’re discussing digital marketing, some popular hashtags you could use include #marketingdigital and #digitaladvertising.
Image via LinkedIn
In comparison, a hashtag like #digitalmarketingtips has fewer followers, so it might not be the best one for you.
Try Social Media Ads
While using social media organically to promote your virtual event is one way to manage your spends, you can still pair it with paid ads for better results.
Paid promotions on social media can help you scale up your event’s visibility quickly. And more importantly, in a targeted manner as you can select your target audience for the ad.
Additionally, you have full control over the ad creative, so you can design it to get sign-ups for your event.
Ask Sponsors and Speakers to Promote Event
If you have event sponsorship for your virtual event, you can ask the sponsors to promote it to their audience. To make it easier for them to do it, you can provide the material, links, and graphics to them.
Similarly, you can request your guest speakers to share the event with their followers on social media. Most will agree to do it as it promotes them too, so make sure you reach out to them and request them to share even information on social media.
Leverage Your Social Media Platforms for Better Virtual Events
Social media is a powerful tool to maximize traction for both your event and brand. You can make use of the above social media marketing strategies for virtual events to get more participation in your event.
Building a buzz around your event will not only widen your market but also increase your revenue. So, go ahead and implement these strategies to turbocharge your event