Death, Taxes, and Social Media

Whether we like it or not, social media is here to stay and it is an incredibly powerful way to promote brands and ideas. For event organizers and attendees alike, social media is a valuable tool to utilize.

For attendees, events provide a terrific way to quickly expand your follower base. By using event handles and hashtags you can expose like-minded people to your thoughts and account. Try it just once. Tweet at an event using the hashtag and see how many new followers you gain. Likely the number from just a couple of tweets will be greater than you typically see in a week or even a month's time. For organizers, social media can drive attendance and expand the exposure to your content during and after the event.[Tweet "Social media is a valuable tool for both event organizers and attendees. #GovEventsBlog"]

With the value of using social media clear, how can we make it less burdensome? Here are a few tips:

• Collect and prep - Attendees and planners alike should collect all speaker and sponsor social media handles and have those ready to go. Guide show speakers to the content you and/or your audience wants to hear with pre-event posts that say things like "Excited to hear more about how agencies are meeting data center mandates @show." Tag applicable speakers and you may even help drive some of the content.
• Draft ahead of time - For event organizers, this is critical. You know what will be happening at the event (for the most part) and you know what you want attendees and others to know. In addition to pre-drafting promotional posts, draft and schedule day-of posts so there is a steady flow of predictable content. Other posts that may need real-time updates added (say quotes from a speaker) can be drafted with a placeholder. For attendees, you may not be able to pre-draft tweets (other than "attending @show today see you there!) but, you can outline the topics you are most interested in sharing with your followers and keep that list handy as you listen to speakers and participate in sessions.
• Let others do the work for you - Provide partners, sponsors and speakers with pre-drafted posts so they can share on-brand and on-message content with their followers. This way you create the content once but it is shared a dozen or more times. For attendees, share your insights with your organization's communication or social team for them to retweet or share as new content. They'll be thankful for the help in filling their own social feeds.
• Automate it - This article highlights several tools that can help automate social media without making it feel like a robot is writing your tweets. Tools include everything from programs that randomly post a set of evergreen-type posts (think: iPod shuffle), to finding the right kind of followers based on keywords, to automatically pulling old, but relevant, posts to share with new audiences.[Tweet "Set it and forget it and other tips for using social media to promote your event. #GovEventsBlog"]
• Set it and forget it - While there is no consensus on the best time to post to social channels, those looking to influence the government space tend to have the most success with commute-time posts. This is the time where government workers who may not be able to access social sites at work are getting their fix. Carve out time each morning and/or afternoon and do your posts. You can automate them to go out at that time and you can also set an "appointment" on your calendar to force yourself to sit down and review your account and others, ensuring each day you have time blocked off to manage your social feeds.

[Tweet "Tips to make social media promotions for events less burdensome. #GovEventsBlog"]We'd love to hear from you. How are you taking the work and even (sometimes) the pain out social media? Share your thoughts in the comments!