How to promote your event online, part 1 — Twitter
Lots of folks will tell you to use Twitter to promote your events online. But I haven’t yet seen too many offer specific ideas on how to do this. I want to kick-off a new series of online event promotion how-to articles with some specific answers to the question “How, exactly, can I use Twitter to promote my event?”
It should go without saying that some Twitter tactics won’t be appropriate for all types of events. There are also differences in what you can do that relate to whether or not you already have a Twitter following.
But one tactic that doesn’t require having an established Twitter following, that I’ve seen used by some of our savvier event holders, is to create a Twitter account named for your event. One of the coolest things about Twitter is that the medium seems to be quite tolerant of brands and companies having their own Twitter voices. One of my favorite examples of this is Zappos, where the voice of Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh, blends with and dissolves into the voice of the company, to interesting effect.
So too can your event have its own life (and voice) on Twitter. Here’s an instructive example from BarCampAfrica, an Eventbrite customer. If you try this out for yourself, do try to be more imaginative than just posting “Attend [insert name of your event]” over and over again. When the Twitter identity is the name of your event, it’s a foregone conclusion that what you are doing is self-promoting. You can afford to be conversational.
The first step is to gain the attention of your intended audience by following them. Each time you follow someone, you’re delivering a targeted ad into their email inbox that says “Hi”. From there, you can easily increase visibility for your event among your network by posting updates as the event draws nearer, announcing speakers, etc. and engaging other Twitterers directly on topics of relevance to your event. This is also a great way of expanding your visibility beyond your immediate network, by using Twitter search (or Tweetscan) to find other people who are talking about topics relevant to your event. For example, if your event is about bio-diesel, you could find other people who are Twittering on the subject of bio-diesel, gain their attention, and by engaging with them via direct responses and getting them to follow you, you also gain the attention of all the people following them. This works!
Also, don’t be shy about asking your friends who tweet to spam your event. Thoughtful recommendations from people you know are a building block of the social web. This technique is particularly effective in building a sense of urgency around your event, by having people just tweet that they are going to attend. Very, very effective on the day of the event.
Twitter is a great way to aggregate the attention of like-minded individuals. This lends itself well to cultivating an audience towards which you can promote your events over time. More so even than e-mail, timely Twittering can keep your constituents connected to your messages. In the persona of your next event, post links, share resources and call attention to any of the ideas you consider important. Then, when you’re ready to promote your next event, you’ll have a ready audience of potential attendees right at your fingertips.
One Comment to “How to promote your event online, part 1 — Twitter”
This is a follow-up post, because so many of you have asked me about Twitter SEO. Specifically, how to build the Pagerank of your Twitter page. The answer relates to the ways a website distributes Pagerank throughout it’s domain. Prior to the wide adoption of the XML sitemap protocol by all the search engines, which allows for the ability to afford relative importance-weight to individual pages, the SEs relied on intra-site links to discern which were the most important pages on a site. The way it works is the absolute Pagerank of a site (and by that I mean the external Pagerank, the Pagerank given to a website by its link relationships with other sites) is distributed to other pages on that site by the number of links given to those pages and by the Pagerank of the pages giving those links. It’s essentially the external Pagerank mechanism, with the key difference being that external Pagerank comes from the collective effect of all the sites that link to one site, while internal Pagerank flows from the page with the highest PR (usually the home page) on a site, down to the pages to which it links, and so on. On most sites, the highest PR pages are simply those linked to from the home page — about us, etc. But UGC sites create the opportunity to exploit user activity to distribute Pagerank, which is extremely cool. Twitter does this by creating links on user pages when they follow people. This allows “popularity” (literally) to determine which are the most important Twitter pages on Twitter.com. What this means for those of you who are interested in building the INTERNAL Pagerank of your own Twitter page is that you simply have to get a lot of people to follow you. Duh. But there’s a rub. Twitter displays only a limited number of follower links on each person’s Twitter page. Recently, this number was reduced dramatically from about 100 (tiny thumbnails) to just 36. Clearly, they realized the system is more effective with a smaller number. But not too small, here’s why. Twitter displays only the TOP-36 people you’re following. They are sorting the pages of the people you follow by their internal Pagerank and displaying only the highest ranking people in your sidebar. This is a brilliant system since it allows for both regionalized and distributed clustering modalities at many levels of relative magnitude. Most people would think that the best thing to do is try to get high PR people to follow you. But the problem is that popular people (especially the SUPER popular) follow a lot of popular people, too. It’s part of their own popularity, lol. So, even if followed by one of them, your link will never appear in their sidebar. There are just too many more popular people ahead of you. So what you want to do is get people to follow you who are following fewer than 36 people themselves. This guarantees your link will show on their page. As your PR grows, you’ll be able to target-follow any person into whose “top 36″ list you qualify. With practice, you’ll get a feel for who you need to go after. It’s really fun seeing yourself show up in high positions on people’s pages!
on November 5th, 2008 9:53 pm
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