5 Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid While Planning for Your Next Event

Whether strategic, or in real-time, social media marketing mistakes can be a real event killer. It’s incredibly important to have everyone on board with a single fluid strategy or problems in communication could end up as problems that prevent your event from kicking off as you had planned. In order to avoid financially or branding mistakes, take a few moments to go over these five mistakes in social media marketing that could affect your event planning negatively.

1. One-Way Street Interactions

One of the biggest mistakes any social media campaign can make is to regularly barrage your fans and followers with push marketing efforts. No one wants to see a constant stream of self-promotional marketing content flooding their feed. Instead, make sure you offer more of a two-way relationship in your social feeds. Here’s your chance to deepen your relationship with prospective consumers as well as your current event attendees.  Use entertainment, awe-factor news and other handy media tidbits to keep your fans on your radar. You should aim to provide a couple agenda-free post for every piece of direct marketing content.

2. Too Much Focus on Quantity

Getting thousands of fans to your site can be a true sign of success for your planned event. However, you should only really aim for the most organic fans. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t appreciate every fan, regardless of where they came from, you should. However, what you shouldn’t do is spend money to gain ‘instant’ fans. If you are going to pay someone to help you aggregate new fans for your feed, pay someone who knows how to do it organically. That is, gather the fans in the demographics you need the most. This does require footwork, and time, but with this method, you will end up with 100 fans who comment and interact. Much more valuable than 1000 fans who have no intention of ever doing so.

3. Using the Same Strategy for All Media Channels

Unless you want to bore your event attendees, you really should plan to use all formats of social media that you can. When you do, remember, they may all achieve a similar end, but they are not all the same. Everything changes. The lingo, the content, the ideal times to post. On Facebook you will want to monitor your updates, be ready to chatter about the event when people communicate on your page. With Twitter, you’ll want to narrow down the best hashtags to use to get your event in front of as many folks in your targeted demographics. On YouTube, you will want to post your videos at optimal times and share them across all of the most relevant social and video websites.

4. The Post and Go

Not interacting with prospective event attendees makes every single one of your social media efforts null-and-void. That’s what social media is for; to be social and sociable. Without that interaction you are just sending your messages into cyberspace where they will be short lived as any type of trending news. There are some great social media monitoring tools out there like Social Mention or Klout that can help you gauge how well you are doing on the ‘social scene.’ Keep track with those mentions, adjust posting times to when your audience seems the most lively, and wait. Be ready to reply to facebook status update posts, comments on your YouTube videos and replies or retweets on Twitter. Thank your retweeters too! They might become new fans if they aren’t already.

5. Not Using the Proper Social Media Platform

Not every platform should be used by every industry for every event. If your event is centered around photography, you may want to have an Instagram and a Pinterest account, but you have little need for YouTube. Slideshows are nice, but they aren’t the most highly viewed items on a video platform. Take those photography slideshows to another platform like Slideshare where they will make themselves useful. Don’t forget the value of Twitter when it comes to on-the-spot social interaction. Make sure to create a unique hashtag for your event where everyone involved can keep in Tweet communications with one another.

Social media is easy once you get used to it. Just make sure to maintain conformity, share professionally designed event invites or other communications and interact! Every chance you get.

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