5 Successful Tips for Twitter Event Promotion

Why should you promote your events on Twitter? How can you craft the perfect hashtag, and how can your event go viral? In this guide, we’ll answer all of these questions and more.

The event is planned, speakers are lined up and vendors are all confirmed — but how do you make sure that the right people attend and the world hears about it? Twitter is an optimal channel to promote your events on because people look to Twitter for live news, updates, and engaging content. If you follow the right strategy, your event can reach millions of people who are interested in what’s going on.

What will we cover:

1. Why Twitter is the perfect platform for event promotion
2. Steps to developing a pre-event strategy with visual content
3. How to craft the perfect hashtag for your event
4. Choosing the right person to manage your Twitter account
5. How to get everyone involved
6. Working with social media influencers

First of all, why Twitter?

Let’s cover the stats:

People from all over the world turn to Twitter for live updates about trending topics and news. In fact, there are 330 million Twitter users in total.

36% of Americans between the ages of 18-29 use Twitter, as well as 22% of Americans between the ages of 30-49. This means that young professionals are constantly consuming and sharing news on the platform, and according to Twitter, there are hundreds of millions of tweets per day.

A lot of people turn to Twitter each day, but how does this directly tie into events? When it comes to events, Twitter is the ideal platform to promote them on. In Q3 2017, Twitter live-streamed more than 830 events, almost three-quarters of them to a global audience. Plus, they found that tweets with videos are six times more likely to be retweeted than tweets with photos.

What do all of these stats tell us? Twitter has extremely high engagement rates and a global reach, which enables brands to promote their events to targeted audiences to gain the most traction, increase sales, and awareness.

Let’s dive into the 5 ways you can promote your events on Twitter.

Tip 1: Developing a Pre-event Strategy with Visual Content

It’s important to build anticipation and excitement months before your event takes place. Work with your team to develop a strong pre-event strategy that will help you increase awareness and ticket registrations. This is your chance to explain why your event will be worthwhile to attend and encourage people to register.

Develop branded designs and videos so that your event will be recognizable on Twitter. Photos are shareable content and can improve your reach, especially if you receive retweets. Take a look at some examples below: 

You can also use videos, interviews and speak with influencers to spread the news about your event. See what WeWork and NextGen did to promote their events with video:

Once you have enough content to promote your event in advance, begin posting it on Twitter and measuring engagement. The more likes and retweets you get, the more people you will reach.

Tip 2: How to Create the Perfect Hashtag

Creating the perfect hashtag is really important and can improve your chances of being a trending topic on the day of your event. Your hashtag should be short, easy to remember, and fun. Remember, relevance is key.

People who attend your event will use this hashtag before, during and after, so you want to make sure that it is simple, but still stands out. According to Buffer, tweets with hashtags receive 2X more engagement than those without hashtags.

Here are some examples of event hashtags:

• #HPEDiscover
• #RSAC
• #TedxSwan18
• #GHC18
• #99UConf
• #ForbesWomenSummit

Each of the above hashtags are relevant to the event, straightforward, short, and easy to remember. Work with your team to develop the perfect hashtag and begin including it in all of your tweets.

Tip 3: Choosing the Right Person to Manage Your Twitter Account

Use your company’s Twitter account, or a separate event Twitter account for the day of your event. Once you have your page in place, choose someone (or multiple people) who will be responsible for all of the coverage during the event. This person should be social media savvy, have access to all aspects of the event, and be outgoing.

They will enable anyone who couldn’t attend the event, to feel like they are a part of it, and they will interact with guests and speakers who could make it. Use live photos, behind-the-scenes content, as well as video interviews and live video streaming.

To make this process easier, you can design a plan for how the event will be promoted on the actual day. Perhaps you want to interview speakers after they get off the stage — this individual can reach out to all speakers and schedule a time for them to sit down together for quick 5 minute video interviews.

Videos, photos, and tweets will help keep everyone engaged during the event and they should be posted in real-time. Another responsibility they will have is to reply to each tweet within an hour. The more timely you are with feedback, the more engaged your Twitter followers will be.

Take a look at these posts that were tweeted live during an event:

Tip 4: How to Get Everyone Involved

Now that you have the perfect hashtag in place and staff who will cover the event on social, make sure to get everyone else involved too. Speak with vendors, speakers, sponsors, employees, customers, attendees, affiliates and event staff to encourage them to live-tweet the event. 

Create incentives to get everyone involved. For example, you could offer movie tickets to the team at your company who tweets the most about the event. Or, you can tweet about your sponsors as long as they promise to tweet about your event as well. 

Take a look at how the Collision Conference promoted their event sponsor:

Make sure everyone is excited about the event and knows exactly how to share content on the big day.

Tip 5: Work with Social Media Influencers

Influencer marketing has become a huge marketing strategy used by brands to spread awareness and drive sales. If you have room in your event budget, team up with various social media influencers who are relevant to your event and industry. Make sure that your target audiences follow them on Twitter and that the content they share is relevant. 

Working with successful influencers can increase your reach and is a great way to promote your event on Twitter. 

Take a look at these influencers who promoted events on Twitter:

If you can get a celebrity, politician, or well-known influencer to tweet about your event, you can increase your following and reach so that more people will attend and engage.

Similar tactics can be applied to an event partner marketing strategy.

Wrapping up: Promoting Your Event on Twitter

Social media increasingly plays a central role in event marketing, and Twitter is the perfect channel to draw people in. Twitter is the place people go to for all news, updates and trends and promoting your event the right way is important when it comes to raising awareness and increasing ticket sales or event registrations.

Ways you can promote your event on Twitter include:

1. Developing a pre-event strategy
2. Crafting the perfect hashtag for your event
3. Choosing the right person to manage your Twitter account
4. Getting everyone else involved
5. Working with social media influencers

In sum, Twitter is a powerful channel to promote your event on and can transform the way you plan, execute and share all event updates.