14 IFTTT recipes to hack social media marketing

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, journalists, general public.

If you’re not familiar with it, IFTTT (If This, Then That) is a free utility that automates tedious online tasks.

For example, updating Google spreadsheets with retweets, updating profile pictures across networks, or uploading Instagram pictures to DropBox.

Basically, it’s a digital personal assistant who takes care of repetitive tasks, based on simple if/then rules. The automated tasks you create with IFTTT are called recipes.

Here are 14 IFTTT recipes for nonprofit marketers:

1. Add a calendar event by voicemail
2. Create shared meeting notes via email
3. Update a Google spreadsheet when someone makes a donation
4. Track #hashtags in a Google spreadsheet
5. Get a text if your competitor blogs about a specific topic
6. Track an Instagram contest in a Google spreadsheet
7. Save all your Instagram photos to DropBox
8. Post Instagram pictures to Tumblr
9. Post Instagram pictures to Flickr
10. Update your Facebook Page when an event starts
11. Save all your tweets in a Google spreadsheet
12. Email your iPhone photos
13. Save new comics from The Oatmeal to Pocket (of course!)
14. Text to get away from people (this one’s funny!)

Do you have a favorite IFTTT recipe I should add to the list? Post it in the comments.

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Create more effective calls to action with personas

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, marketers, Web publishers, video producers.

Marketing personas are powerful tools to help you create more effective call-to-actions, social media content, landing pages and email messages.

This free e-book will walk you through eight steps to creating and using effective marketing personas for your nonprofit.

You will learn:

• What marketing personas are and why you should care.
• How to discover the emotional triggers that motivate your supporters.
• Four questions that will breathe life into your personas.
• Resources for finding photos you can use for your personas.
• How to use your personas to improve your website content.

Also included is a six-page template you can print out and use to create your own personas.

Download this important workbook now:

 

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Don’t overlook the visual component of social media marketing

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, social enterprises, social media managers, marketing professionals, businesses, brands, Web publishers, photographers.

Guest post by Karissa Van Hooser
Marketing associate, Walker Sands Communications

It seems as though everyone is looking for creative ways to engage their audiences through social media. When social media experts develop a campaign, however, many turn to the usual outlets, Twitter and Facebook, with good reason. These social media outlets reach a large, engaged audience.

Flickr, on the other hand, is an often overlooked but effective social network where the emphasis is on visuals: photos and short video clips. Here are a few reasons why you should add Flickr to your next social media campaign.

People are visual
1You’re able to tell a story in a way you can’t through other mediums. Let’s face it: people like to look at pictures. Plus, the change of scenery is nice. Most people, when browsing online, typically stare at text; mix it up to create more ways to engage with and inform your audience.

You can share your photo stream
2The Flickr community is not the only place where people can see the photos you post to the site. Flickr makes it easy to share photos across all social media platforms.

It’s good for searches
3The tags you assign to your photos are used in search. This allows people with your interests to more easily find you, and enables your audience to grow beyond people who already know about your brand.

Higher picture quality
4Picture quality is much higher on Flickr than any other social media platform. On Flickr, you will have fewer grainy images, and your presentations will be much sharper.

Creative Commons
5Flickr provides a safe platform for pictures. They offer creative commons, which means you pick the stringency of your copyright. This feature can give you peace of mind that others aren’t using (or misusing) photos without your permission. This is something you don’t always get with other social media platforms.

You can start discussions
6Flickr allows you to create groups and comments, just like all other social platforms. Although the focus is on photographs and videos, people are still interacting with each other – and could be interacting around images and videos of your brand or client.

Now, go get a Flickr account and let the fun begin!

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Platform sources online volunteers to help nonprofits get the most out of the social Web

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, online media professionals, social media managers, marketing professionals, individuals.

Guest post by Jennifer Helfrich
Communications Manager, Media Cause

Having a social media strategy is an essential component for effective nonprofits and the causes they represent. However, creating a strong Web presence requires funding, technical skill and time – three things many nonprofits never have enough of. Case in point: James Schaffer, executive director of the Tiba Foundation, says finding time for the social Web is a frequent challenge. “Most of our time and effort goes to our actual project work, so when it comes to Web outreach, it can be a little overwhelming trying to gain a foothold out there.”

Enter Media Cause. Eric Facas founded the nonprofit Media Cause in April to connect admirable organizations like the Tiba Foundation with Internet outreach professionals interested in volunteering. Facas found that social media experts capable of giving advice want to support good causes, but many don’t have the time to take on a pro bono client. For a flexible and relatively small time commitment, Media Cause allows volunteers from around the world to connect with nonprofits and offer their expertise on focused project needs. Most projects posted on Media Cause are hourlong commitments, can be sorted by cause and can be completed entirely online. Volunteers can offer expertise in three areas: search engine optimization, social media marketing and Google Grants support.

Proven track record of helping nonprofits

Hundreds of successful match-ups between nonprofits and volunteers have been made since Media Cause’s launch in April. Here are some examples of recent projects nonprofits have posted and the expert advice they have received:

• Children Across America posted a Media Cause challenge asking for help with the organization’s Twitter account. Lianne Murphy of the United Kingdom volunteered her expertise and responded with a bullet-point list of valuable advice — for instance, the proper use of hashtags. Executive director Raymond Fellows says he feels indebted to Murphy for her advice. “We had basically written Twitter off as ineffective but she showed us the difference between ‘using Twitter’ and ‘effectively using Twitter.’”

• The Tiba Foundation has posted a series of challenges through Media Cause asking for volunteers for a variety of social media advice. One such project was titled, “Help Tiba understand the power of social commenting and engagement!” and received a flood of responses. Joselyn Bickford submitted tips for creating a more personable Facebook page, Nicola Parry sent along a helpful blog post on the topic, and Varangi Vora commented with general thoughts on tactics for improving online presence. Executive director Schaffer says Media Cause has sharpened the Tiba Foundation’s social media edge. “The advice from Media Cause volunteers has been great,” says Schaffer. “The Media Cause Web platform has been easy to use, and we’re starting to see the results in terms of traffic and engagement on our Web properties.”

Will you volunteer to amplify the voice of a nonprofit?

Nonprofits consistently struggle to reach and engage their supporters. Those with the media know-how and technical savvy who could truly help these nonprofits have busy schedules that make volunteering difficult. Even given the time, nonprofits and potential volunteers might never find each other. Media Cause provides the space for these two communities to connect, and a simple, constructive method for skilled professionals to give back. A portion of your spare time could amplify the voice of a nonprofit. Work your media magic for a cause: Sign up as a Media Cause volunteer today.

The post Media Cause: Crowdsourced online marketing for nonprofits appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause and community organizations, foundations, NGOs, businesses, brands, government agencies, conference organizers, educators. Second of two parts. See part 1: 5 ways to use social media to build a crowd for your event.

Guest post by Tamara Mendelsohn
Director of Marketing, Eventbrite

Social media is becoming an indispensable means of promoting any event these days. Think about what are the best channels to reach your target audience: blog, Twitter, Facebook or something else.

In part 1 we covered five guiding principles on promoting events, from choosing the proper platform and defining success metrics to inviting friends and stakeholders. Below are five more tips that will make your event a success.

Use Twitter to generate buzz and allow your attendees to connect

6Create an event hashtag and promote it. Encouraging dialogue with Twitter hashtags is an excellent way to build buzz around an event. However, it’s important to step in and designate what the event hashtag will be as early in the process as possible (if you don’t, others will do it for you and there will most likely end up being multiple ones, diluting the effect). Then publicize the hashtag in advance across all channels — put it on your registration page, website, and use it in every single one of your Twitter posts.

Once at the event, plan to promote it repeatedly: in signage, in printed programs, and from the stage. Your goal is to get every tweet about your event to contain your hashtag. The hashtag will aggregate all Twitter conversation around the event and help attendees connect and spread the word. Some events run contests — for example, asking trivia questions on Twitter related to the event topic, and requesting that all responses contain the Twitter hashtag — to get traction for the hashtag early on. TechCrunch50 did a random drawing from all people who tweeted with their hashtag and gave away free tickets to their event.

Engage your attendees with a profile on Twitter

7Create a Twitter profile. Because Twitter is automatically more public than Facebook (you don’t have to be friends with people for them to see your tweets), using a personal profile to promote your event on Twitter is totally acceptable (as opposed to Facebook where you might not want to do that if you reserve your Facebook profile for more personal communication). In fact, attendees might like to see the face behind the event and connect directly with you as the organizer, and Twitter is perfect for this.

However, for larger or frequently recurring events, creating a dedicated Twitter profile is a great way to engage attendees if you have reason to engage with them year-round. Whether it’s your name or the event name in the profile, use it much like the Facebook fan page: to share event information as it unfolds as well as engage with attendees.

Find the right influencers

8Reach out to stakeholders and influencers to help spread the word. It’s really easy to search for people on Twitter, and most influential people keep their profiles public. Reach out to them over Twitter to let them know about your event and encourage them to help spread the word. If they think it’s a great event, they will most likely share it with their followers because sharing valuable information is the best way for them to stay relevant with their followers. Get people that are involved with the event as talent or speakers to engage as well. Call them out in tweets and they will often retweet what you have to say, adding a personal note of their own.

Use LinkedIn to leverage business communities

9Post the event to LinkedIn. At a bare minimum, you can create an update that includes a few words on why you are excited for the event and a link to your Eventbrite page. We’ve seen this drive some traffic for event organizers, especially for professional events. Posting the event to LinkedIn can generate additional traffic and interest for your event. It’s relatively easy to set up: just go to the events section of LinkedIn and click on the “Add Event” tab. Enter in your event details, including a link to the Eventbrite page where they can buy tickets. When you publish the event, it automatically sends it out to all your LinkedIn connections. Seek out LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your event and let them know about it as well as sharing the event with specific contacts, which LinkedIn easily lets you do. If enough people respond that they are interested or attending, your event will bubble up to the top of the Events area and drive additional traffic.

Create your own community to provide a more branded experience

10 Build your own community. For the biggest and most complex events (typically conferences), building your own community may make sense. However, you really need to consider the value that you are bringing when you ask people to set up a profile and participate in a new community. SXSW built a community where members can nominate panel ideas and vote on them, put a custom schedule together, and participate in different event-related discussions. There are solutions like Pathable that let you brand their pre-built community platform and integrate it into your site so that you don’t have to build the functionality from scratch. This strategy is only for those committed to putting in the time and effort needed to encourage participation and build a community that brings value beyond just threaded discussions.

Have your own suggestions? Please share in the comments!

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Take the pulse of the social Web by hitting these rich targets

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, brands, businesses, NGOs, educators, independent publishers, individuals. In this social media monitoring series:
• Guide to monitoring social media conversations
• 10 paid social media monitoring services for nonprofits
• How to build & manage a monitoring dashboard

Ready for a listening program? There are a wealth of free monitoring tools to choose from.

Free monitoring tools may fill your needs if you work for a small nonprofit or your business has no need for more sophisticated services (coming tomorrow). Just remember: Free monitoring tools aren’t really free — they require an investment of staff time and analysis.

And a word of advice: Don’t begin with the tools. Begin with a strategy — a social media game plan. Think of this as a multi-step process: Listen, learn, engage, act and measure. Listening is only the first step — you need to take action on what you discover. (Socialbrite can help you with an integrated approach to social media.)

Yesterday we covered why monitoring is essential to your organization. Today we’ll look at the wealth of free monitoring tools available to you, divided by functionality.

Here is our Guide to Free Social Media Monitoring Tools. Have your own favorites? Please share in the comments.

Monitor social campaigns

Wildfire: How is your brand performing in social?

1Wildfire, a startup focused on creating interactive promotions on social sites, last month launched Social Media Monitor, a tool that tracks and compares how brands are performing on Facebook and Twitter. Wildfire allows companies, small businesses, marketing agencies, nonprofits and bloggers to create their own branded interactive campaigns — including contests, giveaways, incentive-based surveys and sweepstakes — and to simultaneously publish them in multiple social networks and on their websites. More than 65,000 users have done so. As we understand this, the basic tools are free and Wildfire also sells premium services.

Monitor social networks & blogs

Social Mention: Widgets & social search

2Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches for keywords on social media platforms — including blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos and microblogging services — and provides metrics around keywords and “sentiment.” It also provides graphic illustrations or charts showing mentions per day or week. Download the free search bar for your browser and monitor anything from your brand to your cause. They also offer APIs and provide coding for your own keyword monitoring widgets.

Alternative:
• Collecta lets you enter any search term to receive real-time results for mentions in social media, in blog comments and on news sites.

Google Reader: Begin with a dashboard

3Social media monitoring begins with a dashboard. (See our Top 10 social media dashboard tools.) A good choice to begin your monitoring is Google Reader: Subscribe to the RSS feeds of top blogs in your sector, competitors’ sites, news sites, Twitter searches and more, all in one place. You can even subscribe to searches on sites like Flickr and YouTube, so you’ll get an update on any new image or video that matches your brand or cause. If the page you’re on doesn’t seem to have an RSS feed, try Feedyes.com. We also like Feed Informer, which lets you splice multiple feeds together into one and filter for duplicates.

Alternatives: Bloglines, Netvibes.

BlogPulse: Take the pulse of the blogosphere

4BlogPulse from NM Incite is an automated trend discovery system for blogs that analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere. You can keep on top of key phrases, top blog posts, videos, key people news sources and more. But its real power lies in the options you have to track blog conversations based on topics or keywords. See which blogs, news posts, etc., are fueling the most conversations about your brand online.

Other blog monitoring services that should be in your arsenal:

• Google Advanced Blog Search
• IceRocket

Alltop: Identify the top blogs in your sector

5Alltop, Guy Kawasaki’s online magazine rack – or, more precisely, topic-based directory — lets you search for influential blogs in a given niche or subject. Add the feeds to your RSS reader and you have a more targeted monitoring process.

Monitor Twitter & Facebook

Hootsuite: Simplify your social efforts

6We’re fans of Hootsuite as a free tool that enables nonprofits and cause organizations to update multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook) from a computer or mobile device. The free version lets you work with up to five social networks and two RSS feeds but is limited to one user for your organization’s account; it stores stat history for 30 days and is ad supported. For the paid version, see 10 paid social media monitoring services for nonprofits.

Alternatives:
• Tweetdeck
• Seesmic
• Cotweet

Twitter search options

7If Hootsuite or one of the other Twitter dashboard services doesn’t meet your needs, you have lots of other options to keep tabs on the Twitterverse. Here are a few:

• Twitter Advanced Search is the best way to ferret out tweets about a targeted sector. Look for keywords, search by location, date or with other filters.
• Track is a little-known Twitter feature that lets you track keywords and have them sent directly to your mobile phone as soon as they’re posted.
• Monitter lets you monitor Twitter for key words, phrases and topics being discussed online at a glance (though we still prefer Hootsuite for this).
• Twazzup is a dashboard program that monitors Twitter, Twazzup will let you know wheneer your keywords are mentioned in a tweet.
• PostRank analytics lets you uncover your influencers, identify which social networks give you the greatest traction and benchmark yourself against the competition.
• Pulse of the Tweeters uses data mining and sentiment analysis to mine millions of tweets and find the most influential people on Twitter around your cause or sector.
• Twitscoop lets you search and follow what’s buzzing on Twitter in real time.
• Twilert sends you emails when it sees keywords on Twitter that you specify.
• Sideline from Yahoo! allows users to create and group custom queries by topics of interest.
• PeerIndex is another option to help you discover authorities and opinion makers around a particular topic.
• MyTweeple checks out your Twitter account and analyzes who is following you back — a good way to monitor reciprocal relationships.
• MentionMap is a visualizer tool that lets you assess the most influential Twitter users in various sectors.
• Twitterfall is a great way to keep up on conversations about an event, or an online chat, using hashtags. You can also use its geolocation panel to see discussions in a geographic area.

Facebook Search: Explore FB conversations

8There are rich conversations taking place about your sector on Facebook right now. So don’t overlook Facebook Search as a monitoring tool. Unearth the people on Facebook who are talking about your brand or cause. Use the Facebook search field and then choose “Posts by Everyone” in the left navigation. You may find new Pages to Like and new people to interact with.

• Openbook may also be useful in turning up mentions of your brand in Facebook status updates.

Monitor upcoming events

Plancast: Stay on top of upcoming events

9Like many of my colleagues, I’ve ditched Yahoo’s Upcoming and moved to Plancast. You can subscribe to get an RSS alert on any new event that matches keywords you select. Keep track of events thrown by your competitors, or stay on top of conferences you may want to attend or co-sponsor.

Monitor with alerts

Google Alerts: Your real-time personal assistant

10Nearly every plugged-in user these days knows about Google Alerts. When Google’s vast army of bots discover a new blog entry or news story that contains a keyword or phrase you specify, it will send you an alert in a time frame you designate: immediately, daily or weekly. What’s more, you can receive alerts via feeds sent to your RSS reader. Enter the topic you want to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you’ll receive. Keep current on your brand, cause, sector or industry — and, of course, mentions of your own name. Also keep in mind that Google Alerts tracks only content indexed by Google.

Related:
• A new service, Google Realtime Search, lets you search the social Web (chiefly Twitter) and create email alerts for search terms.
• TweetBeep is sort of a Google Alert for Twitter. It uses search.twitter.com site for mentions of up to 10 keywords or phrases you specify and will send you emails.

BackType: Track comments & influencers

11BackType Alerts is a free service that sends you email updates whenever a search term is mentioned in a comment. Somebody trash your brand in a blog comment? You’ll want to know right away. BackType will also show you your Twitter influencers who are sharing related links.

Update: BackType was acquired by Twitter in 2011 and is now closed.

Yahoo Pipes: Mash up your content feeds

12Yahoo Pipes is a powerful tool that lets you aggregate and remix content from anywhere online. Its visual interface makes it fairly easy to use. You can use it in innumerable ways — for example, to track Twitter for mentions of your brand, to monitor multiple feeds or to alert you only when feed activity meets a certain activity threshold. For a good example of Yahoo Pipes in action, look at this Social Media Firehose tool, which lets you track your brand or product mentions across a slew of social media sites.

Northern Light: Roll your own search alerts

13Remember the days when editorial filtering counted for something? Northern Light Search has been around forever, it seems. A business research tool, it indexes more than 800 news sources and publications, like the Wall Street Journal and PBS NewsHour, and some 1,600 authoritative industry blogs. They write: “We have editorially honed the content to include only business sources and to exclude the shopping and other consumer sites that clog your results on other search engines.” It offers support for full Boolean queries as well as saved search and alerting capabilities. You can create Search Alerts via email or RSS to help you track subjects you care about.

Monitor with social search

Addict-o-matic: Check the buzz about a topic

14Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a custom page with the latest buzz on a given topic. The browser-based tool offers a one-stop customized site for seeing results across multiple social media channels.

Alternatives:
• Guzzle reads hundreds of feeds on social media sites every second to help you keep abreast of stuff you care about.
• Buzzoo is a buzz aggregator drawing from multiple sources.
• BuzzFeed sports a robust buzz-detection algorithm.
• Twendz, a free tool from Waggener Edstrom, piggybacks off Twitter Search to offer user sentiment in real time.
• Social Seek will tell you who’s making the most noise about your brand.
• How Socialble? sizes up how visible your brand is on the social Web.
• Mon.itor.us is a free website, server and traffic monitoring service.
• See more choices under Twitter, above.

MonitorThis: Browse 26 search engines

1577elements’ monitorThis is a meta-search engine (remember those?) that let you comb through 26 search engines to look for blog posts, news articles, photos, tags and tweets on a specific subject. You may be surprised by some of the results on the more obscure search engines.

Alternative:
• Keotag lets you search multiple search engines, create social bookmark links around a topic or see who has used your brand as a tag.

Monitor comments & forums

Comment Sniper: First mover advantage

16If you have the staff to help manage your brand’s reputation in a deep way, then Comment Sniper is worth a look. Comment Sniper offers you a way to build targeted traffic to your site at no cost by giving you the opportunity to be the first to comment on relevant blog posts about your brand or sector. You set up blogs you want to monitor, and Comment Sniper sends you a desktop notification or text message to your mobile device whenever a new post goes up. Check this tutorial on how to make the process more efficient.

coComment: Keep track of conversations

17coComment is a Web service and Firefox plug-in that helps you keep track of blog comment threads. Whenever there is an update, such as a new follow-up comment, coComment notifies you instantly. It’s a handy service that saves you the trouble of checking back on blogs that don’t offer a comment notification feature.

Alternatives:
• Commentful is another Web service that helps you keep track of blog comments.
• Omgili (Oh my God I love it) forum search engine lets you find communities, message boards and discussion threads about any topic.
• co.mments helps you keep track of conversations.

BoardReader: Monitoring 50,000 forums

18Not all forums and message boards are indexed by Google. BoardReader is a community search engine that crawls forums, blog posts, images and microblogs. It’ll also let you know when a new forum starts specifically to discuss your brand or organization.

Other forum search & alert tools:
• BrandMentions Brand Tracker
• Big Boards
• Yuku Find

Monitor trends

Google Trends: Take the long view

19Google Trends gives you a measurement of the impact that bloggers or a campaign has on a brand. The tool measures the level of interest in specific topics based on searches people conduct over a period of time. One interesting facet is that you can compare multiple sites in the same sector and see the geographic regions where a keyword is most popular.

Related: With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and other properties.

Other choices:

• Trendpedia blog search from Attentio
• Social Trends from Viralheat

Monitor Web pages

WatchThatPage: Keep a watchful eye

20Sometimes you’d like to know when updates take place to an important Web page — say, your Wikipedia page or key pages on your competitors’ sites. Instruct WatchThatPage to keep tabs on any Web page, and you’ll receive an alert any time a change is made to the page.

Alternative: Copernic Tracker ($40)

More free social media monitoring tools

Several companies offer free, limited accounts for commercial tools through the “freemium” business model — not just a free trial but an ongoing free basic service — including:

• Alterian SM2 allows you to search up to five terms with a total limit of 1,000 results, however, there are no real-time alerts, geography or language filters or advanced searches.
• Trackur
• Looxii

Related

• Top 10 social media dashboard tools (Socialbrite)

• 14 free tools to measure your social influence (Socialbrite)

• Monitoring articles on Socialbrite

• Metrics articles on Socialbrite

• How to set up Google Alerts (eHow)

• Listening Tools for Social Media Monitoring (Janet Fouts)

• Four Methods and 40 Tools for Listening (Mission Creep)

The post 20 free, awesome social media monitoring tools appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause and community organizations, foundations, NGOs, businesses, brands, government agencies, conference organizers, educators. First of two parts. Also see part 2: Using Twitter & LinkedIn to promote your event.

Guest post by Tamara Mendelsohn
Director of Marketing, Eventbrite

We often get asked, “How can I leverage social media to promote my event?” So we started collecting best practices from event organizers who use Eventbrite and pulled them into this post to help you get started down the path to social media glory.

It’s important to note that social media is a clunky gun — it’s a channel, not a strategy. The best way for each event to utilize this channel will vary depending on who the target audience is and how they engage online.

Social media: the perfect tool to generate buzz

It’s no silver bullet. That said, social media can be an incredibly powerful promotional tool, allowing you to reach more of the people who care about and ultimately want to attend your event. When people share information about your event with their network, that message carries much more weight than a traditional ad. It’s a personal endorsement of your event. Social media is also the perfect tool to generate buzz, to get people talking about your event in a recorded fashion where others can stumble across it and get caught up in it, too. It’s not a new phenomenon. That’s how people have promoted their events from the beginning: get people talking about it. What social media brings is the ability for anyone to discover the chatter, giving it far more reach and power.

But it can be a game-changer. We’ve built a lot of features into Eventbrite to support sharing of events through social media and we see the results every day. Facebook is the greatest driver of traffic to our site, which means people are sharing your events on Facebook, their friends are seeing the posts show up in their feed, and they are clicking on the links that bring them back to your Eventbrite event page. That’s really exciting, and I hope you can see the powerful implications that it has on the way events are promoted and discovered.

Some guiding principles on promoting events

Choose the platforms that make sense for your event.

1There are a few options when it comes to promoting your event through social media, and each has advantages and disadvantages. For example, Facebook and LinkedIn show who’s attending and they aggregate conversations about the event in one place, while Twitter provides the opportunity for anyone to discover the event. Building your own social network around your event may be the thing to do if you have an appetite for building a richly branded online experience, but it won’t give you the virality of established social networks. Look to strike a balance across several platforms. Most important, understand where your target audience is already engaging. Identify existing communities by searching on LinkedIn, Facebook, or other forums, monitor Twitter conversation, and locate the platforms that have the most activity. This is where you’ll want to place the majority of your efforts.

Define success metrics and don’t underestimate the effort required.

2To new users, online communities might look self-sustaining. They’re not. Facebook, Twitter and the rest all take work, ideally in the form of a dedicated individual who can keep dialogue flowing and seed productive conversations. Continuous new content and engagement tactics are required to grow the vibrant community necessary for achieving buzz around your event. Define success metrics so that you know how you’re tracking — number of fans or followers is a great place to start, but engagement metrics are most important. The Facebook Page dashboard gives good stats and there are some great free Twitter analytics tools (we use Twitalyzer) that can measure engagement levels of your tweets.

Use Facebook to create a destination for engagement

Publish your event to Facebook.

3From right within the Eventbrite management console you can publish your event to Facebook, and it will automatically create a Facebook Event, pulling in all the event details from Eventbrite. You can publish the event as a stand-alone event created by your Facebook profile or as an event associated with a specific fan page. Facebook Events allow you to easily invite your friends and fans and it makes it easy for them to share with their friends. It creates a central location for attendees to begin to connect and share their excitement for the event.

Create a Facebook Page.

4For larger events a dedicated page may be appropriate as a central location to engage with attendees and people interested in learning more about your event. The best pages that we’ve seen post updates almost daily, giving fans a window into the planning process of the event. Have you just secured an amazing caterer? Has an exciting speaker agreed to attend? Has the event received coverage in the media? Multimedia is always compelling: If you can share photos of the space or get the main attractions (speakers, artists, etc.) to post quick videos on their thoughts for the event, it really helps to bring it to life. Your Facebook Page is not only a great way to get your attendees excited but also to get them involved in the event itself by asking them questions that can influence the content or the agenda.

Invite friends and fans to attend and help spread the word.

5Search Facebook for other Pages on topics related to your event and engage with the users there. Like that page and you can then write things on their wall. I would carefully craft your message so that it doesn’t look like spam (people react very negatively to spam), letting people know about the event and why they should attend. Include a link to the Eventbrite page or the Facebook event when you post so users can click through for more content if they are interested. For example, a benefit concert featuring Slash went to the Slash Facebook Page and told the fans that Slash was going to be performing at their benefit concert rather than just saying “Support this great cause and attend this concert.”

You should also reach out to specific individuals who may be connected to your event topic or specific friends that you think would be interested. For example, say John is a big industry influencer. You can “Send John a Message” through the link on his Facebook profile. Again, be very careful to not sound spammy but instead let him know about an event that you think he would be interested in and why. Keep it short and include a link to your organization’s Page encouraging him to Like it and also a link to the Eventbrite page. You can cherry-pick these individuals to connect with, but the real value will come when he Likes your Page or posts that he is attending the event and his whole network sees it.

Have your own suggestions? Please share in the comments!

See part 2: Using Twitter & LinkedIn to promote your event.

Related articles

• Making Your Event More Social (blogs.constantcontact.com)
• Case Study: Social Media Sells Tickets (vivanista.com)
• 12 Social Media Tools for B2B Pre-Event Marketing (socialmediab2b.com)

The post 5 ways to use social media to build a crowd for your event appeared first on Socialbrite.