Love it or hate it, social media is here to stay.
Its popularity increases every single day, with over 3.6 billion users, and counting.
How To Improve Your Social Media Presence
How can you, as an event planner, truly capitalize on the benefits that can come with using platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter?
5 key factors to consider:
- Knowing who to target
- Knowing what to post
- Knowing where to post
- Knowing when to post
- Knowing why you’re posting
Let’s explore what this means to you…
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Knowing Who to Target
Knowing who to target is #1.
Knowing your target audience is key in any business venture including attracting the right people to your social profiles. If you don’t know who you’re targeting, you will be casting such a wide net that you’ll end up with a whole lot of nothing.
To determine your perfect client, use these 6 steps. And remember, don’t rush this part, because it will determine everything you do.
There are several ways to break down the critical information that will help you find, target, and meet the needs of your target audience, including:
- Demographics
- Age, gender, income, education, and marital status
- Geographic
- Country, state, city, and town
- Psychographic
- Personality, attitude, values, and interests
- Technographic
- Mobile-use, desktop-use, apps, and software
- Behavioral
- Tendencies and frequent actions, feature or product use, and habits
- Needs-based
- Product/ service must-haves and needs of specific customer groups
- Value-based
- The economic value of specific customer groups on the business
Having this information is part of the picture — the other part is knowing how to effectively use the information because this narrowed focus helps you cater to the people you’ll truly connect with.
What Makes You Different?
When building your social media platforms, focus on what makes you different and unique. Are you great at table settings, client care, or are you witty and funny? Whatever it is, use it to your advantage.
Your ideal client profile should reflect what you’re good at, and this means you’re focusing on or targeting a smaller segment of people but it’s the most effective way to use social media for your event management business.
For example, I follow #FrenchBulldogs, so whenever someone hashtags French Bulldogs, guess what I see? A post about French Bulldogs!
And knowing who you are targeting will help you know what they want to hear, and what you should be telling them.
2. Knowing What to Post
Content matters. A lot.
Even if you properly target your ideal audience, post at the right time, and select the right platform — but your content doesn’t resonate with anyone — you’ve done nothing but waste time.
When you’re creating your social media strategy, take into consideration:
- The image or video you use
- Your copy
- Hashtags you choose
- Relevant keywords, and
- Tags
Many event planners have a good understanding of what to use in terms of the image or video and copy because it’s fairly straightforward.
Where most people seem to struggle is knowing how to maximize the benefits of hashtags, keywords, and tagging.
Properly Using Hashtags
Hashtags are used to draw attention, connect and promote, and they help you find your ideal audience and improve click-through rates so the right people are finding you and interacting with your posts.
To find the right hashtags, research the trending hashtags that are relevant to your specific event, and add a couple to your posts. But the general rule is to use only five, so you don’t look like you are spamming people.
You simply want your content to be easy to find, and show up on people’s radars.
How to Use Keywords in Social Media
That’s also where keywords come into play. It helps Google find you when people are searching for relevant topics.
Social media keywords work the same way they do on your website.
For example, when you produce a blog post about corporate event planning, then it needs to include relevant keywords like “corporate event planning”. Without this, Google doesn’t recognize your content when people are searching.
Rising to the top of searches helps people find your event business, and I highly recommend using a keyword generator like SEMRush – I have the paid version and it’s worth every penny!
Use Tags to Get Attention
Tagging helps you build your audience and it’s a great way to cross-collaborate while encouraging the account you tagged to share your post.
This method works especially well with Instagram Stories.
So, why do you need to draw so much attention to yourself?
Everyone is busy, so you need to give them something valuable. Content needs to attract, teach, or meet the needs of your audience.
Follow! Research! Borrow!
One simple and easy way to get started is by following your competitors’ social pages. See what they are posting, and what creates the most engagement.
- Follow your competitors
- Research their posts and track what gets the most engagement
- Borrow their ideas.
It’s important to note, borrowing other people’s content ideas does not mean plagiarizing them! However, using similar concepts, ideas or even images can be OK if done correctly.
Once you know what you should be posting, then you need to ask yourself where you should be posting.
3. Knowing Where to Post
Nothing is more obviously redundant than seeing the exact same post across every single social channel. It’s a bit lazy, and it doesn’t allow the person posting to truly capitalize on the unique benefits each platform has to offer.
Of course, there are times when it makes sense to use the same post across every single social channel – like to announce your event is postponed due to inclement weather, for example.
But when you’re announcing the grand opening of your event business, you might want to take a different approach. At least for some of your posts!
Knowing where your audience spends most of their social media hours is where you should focus your efforts, like: Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
So let’s explore the unique benefits of these three platforms, and how to use them, with your business’ grand opening as an example.
As an image-heavy platform, a picture truly paints 1000 words.
A few examples of how you could use this for a business’ grand opening:
- Photos of people enjoying your events
- Countdown to the grand opening, using Stories
- Beautiful pics of previous events you’ve planned
- “Meet the team” posts
Facebook is great for photos, graphics, videos, longer copy, polls, groups, links, and invites.
A few examples of what to share:
- Your bio
- A virtual tour of your office or your next venue – but not of the whole space
- How to plan the right menu for your event
- A beautifully designed invite to the event
- A live Q&A video with you
- This or That Polls – Do you prefer this color or that color, for example
Twitter allows the unique opportunity to share the latest, live information as it’s happening.
It’s also where you can be more playful, like posting a quick “good morning” Tweet with a funny GIF of a kid falling asleep in a bowl of cereal. And, it’s where people (like influencers and celebrities) Tweet about cool events they get to attend.
A few examples of how to use Twitter for your business:
- Tweet “good morning” when they wake up at 5 am for event prep day…with a funny GIF, of course
- Find influencers to Tweet about attending
- Provide status updates on event development, with videos and photos
- Show the progress of the finishing touches to the event decor and set up
Knowing the strengths of various social channels, how people use them, and when they use them will help you know when and what you should post!
4. Knowing When to Post
There’s a strategy behind what day and time are best to post, but that isn’t what we’re going to talk about here. Mainly because it depends on many factors(like your target audience and the platform you’re using) and it changes like the weather.
Today, the “when” refers to when you post in relation to the event itself, and whether or not you post before, during, or after your event (or maybe all three.)
Posting before:
- A teaser – upcoming event!
- Event announcement
- Vendor information
- Guest bios
- Interviews
- Sneak peeks
Posts for during the event:
- Live video feed
- Guest photos
- Product images
- Food pics
- Polls
Posting after the event:
- Success stories
- Testimonials
- Thank you notes to clients and/or sponsors, your team, or even the community
- Polls
As you can see, posting before, during, and after an event can have a powerful and effective way to attract your target audience and leave a lasting impression.
So, now you know the how, what, where, and when…but what about the why?
5. Knowing Why You’re Posting
It’s shocking how many people post just to post, without really thinking through “the why.”
This leads to:
- A weak Call to Action
- Uninformative and lackluster copy
- Unrelated or “too on the nose” images
- A missed target audience
- Ineffective keywords and hashtags
- Overlooked tagging opportunities
Understanding your ultimate goal and what you’re trying to achieve with social media requires you to dig deep.
You want people to attend the grand opening and hire you to plan their event.
That means your true goal is to create a loyal customer.
So, instead of simply announcing the opening of your event business, post parts of the menu you’ll serve at your grand opening, and let guests know that the full menu will be revealed at the party (with samples).
Knowing your true goal allows you to tailor your post to your audience and improve interactions with your social media content.
It’s like setting a GPS to your destination. Knowing where you want to end up allows you to know the exact path you need to take to get there.
While social media isn’t complicated, it is complex, and knowing how to break it down into smaller steps will teach you how to build up a successful system.
How has social media helped you with event management?
I’d love to hear about one of the biggest lessons you’ve learned, so please share in the comments below.
