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When you’re organizing an event, regardless of whether it’s an online or offline (face-to-face) function, one of the primary concerns you might have is how to ensure your target audience actually know about and register to attend your event.

Currently, one of the most effective ways to sell-out your conference is by using an online promotional campaign. Many individuals concentrate on what to do prior to the event, nevertheless you will find there are really three essential phases to promoting your event online.

First, You should strategize how you are going to build awareness of your event and drive registrations prior to it happening. Second, you will want to maintain the buzz and excitement of the event via various online social networks, blogs and channels throughout the conference. Third and finally, as soon as the event has finished, you should have a strategy in place to follow-up with attendees to collect feed-back and get them enthusiastic about attending your next event.

Following are 8 strategic social media ideas to help build awareness and drive registrations prior to the event:

• Announce your event on Facebook

  Develop a Facebook Event, listing all of your event’s details. This provides convenient hub / location for attendees to start to network as well as share their excitement and expectations about the event.

• Develop a Facebook Page

  For larger events, creating a dedicated Facebook page could be appropriate to server as a central location to interact with attendees and people considering attending your event or conference.

• Create a Twitter #hashtag

  Using Twitter, create a #hashtag for your event, and promote it. An excellent way to create buzz around an event, is by encouraging dialog with Twitter #hashtags. Publicize your event’s #hashtag, prior to the event across all marketing channels–include it on the registration page, the event website, and then use it in each and every one of your tweets.

• Run a #hashtag Sweepstakes

  To incentivize people to tweet out the #hashtag and also spread the word about your event, sweeten deal by offering a door prize, free pass or other giveaway for one of the lucky hashtag-ers.

• Post the event on LinkedIn

  At the least, you should create an update which includes a couple of words about why you are excited to be attending the event plus a link to the registration page. Be sure to send the post (invite) to all of your LinkedIn connections.

• LinkedIn Group Event Posts

  Search for LinkedIn groups which are relevant to the conference and let them know about it by posting to the group. In addition share the event info with specific connections which LinkedIn easily enables you to accomplish.

• Develop your own community

  Creating an online community for your event might make sense, but only for the biggest and most complex events (generally mega-conferences or conventions). One exception may be, if your target audience is very tech savvy and highly sociable and visible online already.

• Existing Online Communities

  Search out existing online communities. Prior to the event, it’s essential to identify active communities such as those found on LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook, trade blogs or other forums and find out topics they’re conversing about. It’s also possible to make use of Twitter’s real-time search to learn what the future attendees are talking about and looking to gain from your event or conference. And then you can use this information to fine-tune content for the event and ensure that it’s relevant for the target audience.

e3 Webcasting, LLC., has the experience to provide event marketing services for your next conference. We will collaborate with you to strategically target your audience and make your event a success. It all begins with a friendly conversation with one of our expert, live event streaming producers, who will become your principal point of contact, and will streamline the process of webcasting your event.