How To Promote Your Company’s Seminar Or Conference On Twitter: 3 Things You Can Do TODAY
There are many reasons why a business would run an event. A conference could provide networking opportunities and may help land strategic partnerships with local companies.
A seminar, on the other hand, is an excellent tool for showcasing your company’s expertise while garnering high quality leads to convert at a later time.
Or perhaps a business just wants everyone – their employees and most loyal customers – to have a great time by holding a concert.
The list of reasons could go on and on but here’s the bottom line: you’ve organized an event and you want it to be a success without taking valuable hours away from your business.
So how do you go about encouraging attendance or registrations for your seminar, conference, or concert without losing time and big bucks?
Here’s some good news: if your company has a Twitter profile set up – one that’s optimized with the right links and images in the right places – then step one is already taken care of!
You may even have a few thousand followers under your belt and have a line-up of tweets linked to the event, ready for posting.
But now what!?
You can simply keep tweeting, hoping that your tweets are interesting enough for your followers to click on or retweet. Or you can follow the 3 steps below to further grow your following on the social network…and eventually transform those followers to attendees!
Rake In Leads By Running Competitions And Promotions On The Network
Everybody loves a great contest – and the freebies that go with it!
Twitter is a social media network that allows you to run one. KFC, Maybeline India, Comcast, and other big brands regularly use Twitter competitions to build their audience and engage their current followers.
A social media contest done correctly can generate tons of leads and even registrations for your upcoming event – and you don’t have to be a big brand with a deep marketing fund to get the job done.
Here’s a quick guide rundown of the steps for launching a successful competition:
- Pick a prize to give away. The prize doesn’t have to be expensive (like an iPad, smartphone, or any top-of-the-line gadget) but it has to be something that your current and potential followers like. You can even give out free passes or tickets to really put the spotlight on your conference or seminar.
- Choose the competition or event format depending on your goals. Here are some contest ideas to help you get started:
– Sweepstakes or vote contests to build up your social following or email list.
– Group deals or coupons to generate sales right away
– A user-generated content (UGC) contest to increase engagement.
- Build your contest page. Keep the page simple yet exciting: add an attention-grabbing title, the image of your prize, contest rules and info, entry form, and social sharing buttons. And you’re good to go!
- Spread the word about your contest on all platforms you have access to: send out an email blast, link to the page via your social networks, promote the page through a blog post or site banner, and have your contest listed on popular contest sites.
A guide on X event promotion published by COSRental takes a deeper look at social media contests – the different formats you can use, best practices, and how to use such competitions to spread the word about a business’ event.
Showcase Testimonials Through Embedded Tweets
Word-of-mouth marketing is an extremely potent marketing technique that can drive sales through the roof whether you’re a small-to-medium-sized business or an international company.
A report published by Nielsen in 2013 revealed that 84% of consumers from 58 countries rank word-of-mouth recommendations from family and friends as the most trustworthy form of advertising (also referred to as earned advertising).
Radius Global, an international market research company headquartered in NYC, seems to second Nielsen’s findings: they found that Millennials and Baby Boomers rank word-of-mouth marketing as one of the top influencers when purchasing clothes, packaged goods, financial products, and other high-ticket items.
So how do you take advantage of word-of-mouth marketing to market your event?
The traditional answer was to collect positive feedback and testimonials (possibly from previous attendees) and post those in just about every form of marketing material you have access to like your website, blog, leaflets, etc.
But there’s one big problem with this approach: how can your potential customers know that those testimonials and raving reviews are real?
This is where embedded tweets come to your aid. Unlike testimonials, embedded tweets are linked back to the user who originally posted the review or testimonial for your business, allowing potential customers to validate the feedback with just a click of a button.
Here’s how to use embedded tweets:
- Find the tweet or testimonial you want to embed.
- Click on the “…More” button found within the tweet.
- Click on Embed Tweet from the menu that pops up after.
- Copy the code from the pop-up box that appears and paste it on your site or blog.
If your brand has received a lot of great feedback and reviews through tweets, don’t hesitate to embed them on your website!
Provide Lightning Fast Customer Service
Bigger companies may provide better, cheaper deals to the same people you’re after but you can easily outfox them in other business aspects like customer service.
While bigger competitors put customers through lengthy phone calls and convoluted email processes, you can quickly cut the fat by servicing your customers on Twitter.
The social networking platform allows only 140 characters (or less), making it ideal for immediately identifying a customer’s problem and quickly providing a solution. Not to mention Twitter is mobile friendly, which means you can answer questions while on the go.
Here’s how you can set up your Twitter account for servicing current and potential clients:
- You want to provide customer service 24/7 ideally. But that may not be possible and you should state your operating and customer service hours on your Twitter profile so customers and followers know when to tweet for help.
- Assign someone to keep an eye on all the questions and requests for information posted on Twitter and other social media networks you’re on. Designate someone who’s an expert not just on your products and services but in servicing people too.
- Regularly monitor the Twitterverse for mentions of your brand. Here are some ways to keep track of those mentions:
– Carry out Twitter searches for your handle without @, picking up mentions of your username including those with and without hashtags or @.
– Hootsuite is a social media management tool that allows you to set up a stream for Mentions of your Twitter handle that you can easily review.
- Respond to every mention as much as possible. If it’s a complaint or a request for information, get back to the customer with the solution within the hour. If it’s a testimonial or a positive review, drop a quick ‘thank you’ and let the user know that their feedback is truly appreciated.
Make no mistake about it: this approach takes a lot of time. But this way of providing lightning-fast social customer service can increase grow your following to epic proportions when done consistently and with authenticity…and with greater social following comes better opportunities to promote and drive attendance to your up and coming event.
