5 ways to use social media sites to promote your events

By Joan Stewart

The next time you sponsor a live or a virtual event, don’t forget all the ways you can use social media sites to promote them. Here are five, which I’ll discuss in more detail when I present the webinar “50+ Places Online to Promote Your Live &  Virtual Events to Reach Your Target Market & Pull Sell-out Crowds” at 3 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, Oct. 19:

1.  On Facebook — Create an event on Facebook and tag people who would be interested in attending.

2.  At your blog — Write a blog post about the event and ask people to comment about what they’d like to see happen there.

3.  On LinkedIn — Create an event on LinkedIn and invite connections who you think are in the best position to attend. But go one step further. If your event is local, you can join several business networking groups in your city and post the event to their discussion boards. If the event is virtual or live, look at all the existing groups you belong to and share news about your event with fellow members.

4. On location-based social networks. Use sites like Yelp.com and AmericanTowns.com, two high-traffic sites where people are looking for interesting things to do in their cities, towns and even neighborhoods.

Yelp is an online urban guide that helps people find cool places to eat, shop, drink, relax and play, based on the informed opinions of a vibrant and active community of locals in the know. It lets you talk about what’s great—and not so great—in your world. Started in San Francisco, Yelp is now throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland and France.

You can search by topic, location, city, zip and neighborhood. Post your event, and encourage people who attend it to review it on Yelp.

American TownsThis is a virtual “town square” that delivers information about specific cities, towns and even neighborhoods. It’s perfect for events about arts and entertainment, clubs, organizations, government and politics, health and fitness, religion, spirituality, schools, libraries, sports and recreation, community activism and nonprofits. Share your press releases, create your own events calendar,  upload photos, share articles and take donations.

5. On Flickr – Flickr makes it easy to share photos or video from one person to another in whatever way you wish. If you’re an artist attending an art show, for example, and you want people to visit your booth, upload several photos of your artwork, and let people watching them know how to find you at the show.

Before you plan your event, however, read my list of  27 questions designed to spark creative ideas that will help you generate better publicity for the event.

Hang a banner advertising your Facebook Fan Page

By Joan Stewart

Don’t just create a Facebook Fan Page, and then forget about all the ways you can promote it offline.

Here’s a cool marketing tool that costs little and can attract fans in droves.

It’s a simple Facebook banner that you can hang outside your restaurant, storefront, near the entrance to your park or museum, or wherever your target market gathers. I saw the one shown here outside VanPatten Woods, part of the Lake County Forest Preserve in Sterling Lake, Ill., over the weekend as I was driving by.

Kara Martin, marketing specialist with the Forest Preserve, told me they printed Twitter and Facebook banners in their in-house print shop and display them, one at a time, outside golf courses and other facilities within the preserve. 

“We just replaced the Twitter banner with the Facebook banner this summer,” she said.

The Facebook banner tells people how to get onto their Facebook page.  Notice the small “/LCFPD” printed at the bottom.  

“When we displayed the Facebook banner, we saw the number of fans on your Fan Page shoot up.” 

You can probably have one of these banners printed fairly inexpensively at your local print shop. When you’re done, think of other ways you can promote your social media presence online and offline. See 11 Ways to Avoid Missed Opportunites with Facebook.

Learn how to link surveys & social media at webinar Sept. 14

By Joan Stewart

Looking for ways to really leverage social media for big profits?

My business partner, Jeanne Hurlbert, PhD will be giving you some awesome new ways to do that on a webinar on September 14.

Yes, she’ll be teaching you the things you’d expect, things like how to use blog polls to jumpstart the traffic and conversation on your blog, how to ask LinkedIn questions to start the conversation and build community, how to use social media to drive traffic to your surveys.

But Jeanne will be going WAY beyond that to show you some absolutely awesome ways to team social media and surveys to explode the profits in your business, including:

* How to team social media and surveys for an awesome, two-step process that lets you create products your customers will absolutely BEG to buy;

* How to use social media to craft questions, sampling strategies, and more for your surveys, so you can really get inside your customers’ heads;

* How to use social media to create buzz about your survey results, to position yourself as a leader in your field;

* How to use a HOT new technique to team video marketing and surveys to put your affiliate marketing on steroids;

And much more!

My partner, Jeanne Hurlbert, who’s an expert in surveys and social media and blogs here with me, is the only one teaching how to do this.

She’s hosting a webinar at 3 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, Sept. 14, that will show you how to use surveys and link them to your social media efforts.  Jeanne will teach you new, proven techniques for getting a return on investment from social media and building a huge following.

Listen to Jeanne explain more about what she’ll be teaching you during the webinar “Create Community, Conversions and Cash by Teaming Surveys and Social Media.”

How to link your Twitter and Facebook accounts

By Joan Stewart

One of the most frequent questions we get is how to link your Twitter and Facebook accounts so that your tweets automatically feed into your Facebook status updates, or vice-vesa.

Another is how to save time when doing social media tasks.

You have three options which will solve both problems. Whichever one you choose is personal preferance.

Option 1: Use Ping.fm.

Create an account at Ping.fm, a simple and free service that allows you to send messages or status updates to multiple social media sites at the same time. If you choose this option, make sure the update is fewer than 140 characters so it fits on Twitter. Ideally, it should be closer to 120 so your followers have space left to retweet it.

Also, be careful about sending the same messages to LinkedIn that you post to Twitter and Facebook. LinkedIn is strictly for business networking. Your connections there may not care about personal information you share on a site like Facebook.

I started using Ping but then stopped because I want to customize my messages, depending on which social media site I’m on. But others love Ping because it’s a huge time-saver.

Option 2: Feed selected Twitter updates into Facebook. (This is the one I recommend.)

Use Facebook’s “Selective Tweet Status” app. Go to http://apps.facebook.com/selectivetwitter/ and follow the directions. When you tweet, it will automatically go into your Facebook status update if you type #FB at the end of your tweet.

I like this, because when I tweet several dozen times a day, it can annoy my Facebook friends. This solves the problem because I choose exactly which tweets should feed into Facebook.

The other reason I like this option is because my blog automatically feeds into my Facebook Fan Page. When I post to my blog, I try to write an enticing headline on Twitter to pull people over to the blog. In that case, I do not type “#FB” at the end, because Facebook already has the blog post.

Option 3: Feed Facebook into Twitter

First, add the application to your Facebook account.

Log into Facebook.

Open a second tab and log into Twitter. On Twitter, click on “Settings” on the top right. Go to “Connections.” Click to allow Facebook access. Facebook will ask you to confirm. Now your Facebook status updates are automatically fed into Twitter.

Once you choose a platform, be consistent. Don’t use more than one option or you’ll end up with a tangled mess, including duplicate posts.

Which is your favorite way to link your Facebook and Twitter accounts, and why? Do you link other accounts to each other? If so, which ones?

Show website visitors how to find you on social media sites

By Joan Stewart

If someone visits your website, will they know within seconds where to find you on the social media sites?

“You’d have to be Nancy Drew to find the company blog on most websites, or its Facebook page, or all of its YouTube videos,” says blogger Bl Ochman.

She’s right.

When I read her post about this topic, I quickly went to my own site to see how difficult or easy it was for visitors to find me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.

Alas, there was no mention anywhere! For many of us, part of the problem is that we’re generating so much copy for the social media sites that we often neglect our own websites.

I’ve rectified the problem by adding social media logos and hyperlinks to my profiles on the right side of the homepage, just under my photo. They’re identical to the logos and links in my weekly ezine, The Publicity Hound’s Tips of the Week.

Here are other places where you should be telling people where to find you on the social media sites:

• In your online press room.
• On product packages.
• On invoices.
• On your Google profile.
• In your print or email newsletter.
• Cross-promote from individual social media sites.
• At your blog.
• In your bios.
• In handouts, if you’re a speaker.
• On your book jackets, if you’re an author.

That’s a short list. Can you add to it? Where else do you let people know where to find you on the social media sites? 

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