Effective Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Your Seminar

You’ve set the date and booked your business motivational speaker. Now you need to ensure that as many people as possible attend. Whether you’re planning a seminar specifically for your employees or you’re inviting your entire customer base, or maybe even the entire community, you need to get as many people excited about the seminar and committed to attending as possible. Social media is an easy, free way to spread the news about your event, so use it effectively.

Create an Event Page and Accounts

The first step to promoting your seminar via social media is to create social media accounts for your business and/or for the specific event. Some social media platforms, like Facebook, offer event page creation specifically for this purpose, so you won’t need to create a profile for the event itself. Instead, you can post your event to your business profile. From there, send out social media invites and encourage followers of your business account to attend. You can also choose the option, when creating the event, to allow the people you invite to invite their social media friends. This will allow you to reach even more of the online demographic. It is important to have an estimate of the number of people who plan to attend so you’ll be prepared, and elect to send out automatic reminders as the time and date approaches.

Other social media platforms, like Twitter or Tumblr, don’t have the event page feature, so you’ll have to create an account specifically for the event. However, you can cross-promote and link to your event profile from your business profile so that your customers and employees who are already followers can sign up to follow the new event profile.

Make and Share Videos

Take advantage of the visual medium of the Internet and social media and promote your event via videos. Produce and post videos of the business and what the seminar will be about in anticipation of the event. The more likes, re-tweets, re-blogs and shares you get for the videos, the more buzz will start building around the event.

You don’t have to spend a lot on a professional production if it’s not in your budget, although high-production values will give the videos additional credence. Even videos you shoot with your own camera will help build anticipation for the event.

Interview the Speaker

If you’re looking for a focal point of your promotional campaign, consider highlighting the speaker you’ve booked to present at your event. Rather than simply repeating advertisements for the event on your social media page, you can get people interested and thinking about the event if they learn more about what they’ll learn once they attend.

Ask your speaker or the speaker’s representative if they’d be willing to let you conduct an interview you can post online. Break the interview into snippets and spread them out over the course of several days or weeks so that people check back to learn more and to keep thinking about the seminar.

Spread the News

Encourage social media users to do your work for you. Get one person excited about your event, and they can spread the news through hashtags, keywords and links. With enough excited social media users, your hashtag could start trending. People who are curious to know what your hashtag means will do a little research and learn more about your event. Eventually, new people will become excited, spread the news, and encourage even more people to learn about the event.

Why develop something like a keyword or a hashtag? It’s better to rely on other social media users to get excited about your event and spread the word. Constantly bombarding your followers every few minutes from your event account with news about the seminar is likely to be more irritating to followers than excitement-inducing. However, if the news about your event is linked via a hashtag or keyword from multiple users, it’s not going to come across as spam-like.

According to ComputerWorld, the average American spends almost one-fourth of every online hour on social media sites. Take advantage of the love for social media interactivity by promoting your business seminar or event in an interactive, compelling way. You won’t have to spend a lot — or any — of your budget, and you’re more likely to reach people at your company and in the community with frequent, but not too frequent, social media reminders.

About the Author:
Dennis Scott is a contributing writer and business motivational speaker. He’s planned dozens of events for business both large and small, and he can honestly say that businesses that focused on getting the word out via social media saw the greatest success.