Last week, I presented a session at the YNPNdc 2nd Annual Social Media Summit. It’s always fun when I can spend a hour talking about social media and how nonprofits can use it better. This time, my focus was on how to use blogs, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr to build excitement, attendance and engagement for your next event or conference. With all the nonprofit events out there for people to choose from, how do you make yours stand out?
I was going to share some of my main points here, but other bloggers have done such a great job covering my session already, I’ll just share their highlights instead!
A Doodler’s Notes on Social Media by @giveit2lloyd
- Use attendees as marketing by letting them share on social media that they have registered for your conference.
- Take your conference to the blogosphere! Dole out comp registrations for contributors and/or request recaps from panelists.
- Buy a flip cam and don’t worry so much about editing – capture your conference in the moment.
- Aggregate the conference experience with a Twitter list of attendees.
- Characters are precious. Create a hash tag that people won’t hate.
- Truth: People like looking at pictures of themselves.
SPECIAL EVENT RECAP: YNPNdc Social Media Summit by @msrasberryinc
Rosetta focused on four tools to utilize to promote events: Blogs, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. When asked why she hadn’t included Facebook, she replied that she hadn’t seen it used often or effectively by nonprofits as a way to promote events. Rosetta spoke to the point that you have to build momentum around an event well in advance and that use of the aforementioned tools is a great way to do that. Additionally, you must engage with your audience before, during and after an event to gain a sense of their expectations, as well as to drive registration. Rosetta suggested using Eventbrite as a registration tool because it makes it easy for registrants to share the event with their networks via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
“Events that incorporate live-blogging and live-tweeting have a different vibe. They’re more interesting.” – Rosetta Thurman
You can check out my presentation from the conference below (which you can also find on slideshare).
Other presentations from the YNPNdc Social Media Summit are also available online: http://www.slideshare.net/ynpndc.
What are some other strategies your organization has used to leverage social media for events?
