Business, Event Planning Tips, Planning Tips, Your Event Career
Event Planners: Here’s How to Step Up Your Social Media Game
Social media is crucial to every event planning business. Building a solid online presence will not only help you develop your brand identity, it will help you connect with your target audience, including tons of potential clients. While social media trends are always changing, staying on top of the digital marketing game will make sure your event planning skills stand out from the crowd.
To start out, we’ve put together some ways to help make you and your event planning business kill it at social media. So get brainstorming with your team! Make your website worth a visit during the daily commute ride home…
Create New Content
Connect with new followers by generating as much original content as possible. This doesn’t have to be a difficult process. Things go viral because people identify with them. Focus on your target market and tailor your material so that your readers are so engaged by what you have to say, they are drawn to share it!
Trigger shares
Emotional Shares
Followers are often ‘triggered’ by emotional appeals— and as an event planner, you are already in the business of making dreams come true! Come across a touching couple? Draw attention to heartfelt stories in a special profile.
Helpful tips
Original content often speaks for itself. Move away from gimmick by producing informative posts. Helpful content is always relevant, and quite frankly, hard to beat.
Potential clients, say a bride on the hunt for the perfect dress, may share a relevant post as an FYI to her bridal party. Colleagues and other professionals in the industry may very well be interested in tapping into your knowledge base by sharing your content as well.
Curate items
Absolutely adore some brands? As an event planner, you’ve most likely come across some products that have saved the day—Holy Grail products of event planning, if you will.
A simple way to create new content is to curate! Draw from your own expert opinion to curate things you find interesting and relevant to event planning: products, ideas, trends, DIY tutorials, etc. This isn’t about drawing attention away from your services; it’s about highlighting who you are, and what your style is all about as an event planner.
Offer Exclusive/select Content
Potential clients will be more inclined to start following you on social media if you make it worth their while. Increase traffic to your social media platforms with a special offer.
For instance, you could create a contest where clients have to ‘like,’ or ‘share’ a specific branded image or post in order to win a special prize. Whatever you offer doesn’t have to be so exorbitant that it imbalances your budget. Many clients would love a free consultation, or a product or giftcard from a brand that matches your style. You could even try collaborating with other vendors to up the value!
That being said, make sure you have the legal fine print sorted out before your offer this kind of exclusive content. You want all parties involved to be happy! Guidelines must be clearly laid out and should be easy to understand.
Host an interactive online event interact with your followers/potential clients
As a professional event planner, you are the go-to-guru in your field! Potential clients are scoping out whether they want to hire you for a job. Other followers turn to you for expert advice or event style inspiration. Get to know your target audience by creating interactive online events.
Host an AMA
Make it easy for potential clients to reach it out to you by hosting an “Ask Me Anything” hour on your Facebook or Twitter account.
Backstage Pass
Unsure if you want to host a real-time event? Offer a behind-the-scenes sneak peek of your work. Social media are perfect for those silly, fun, and in-progress pictures that won’t make it into your portfolio.
Showcase top reviews
Inspire testimonials by profiling top reviews, and look into featuring special posts on clients and followers who go above and beyond to engage with you.
Focus on ways you can make visiting your social media pages more enticing! Clients will generate excitement and increase the visibility of your event planning brand.
Get friendly with the competition
Stay relevant by keeping on top of trends. Create Google Alerts and have any new online results on topics you are interested in sent right to your inbox. Follow favorite brands for inspiration and check into Twitter periodically to see what’s trending.
Start using hashtags
From Facebook to Vine to Twitter, start thinking of ways you can link your social media across the board. Not only should you be in the know about the latest in event planning, you should also be aware of the latest in social media. Originally created by a Google employee, hashtags identify keywords and keep them trending. Thinking in terms of keywords will help you increase your visibility.
Experiment with new social media
Snapchat is a recent example of how a highly creative app quickly becomes a game-changer in social media. Initially popular with younger demographic, its temporary ‘snaps’ are now being used by big business to provide intimate “snapshots” of a brand—allowing brands to create a connection with followers.
Instagram is another versatile app. Great for visual content, use this social media platform to showcase your personal aesthetic and distinctive style as event planner.
Look to the ever-changing social media landscape as a fun challenge, and do your best to build and ride ephemeral trends! Soon you may find those filters are hard to resist.
Develop a social media strategy
Draw up an editorial calendar. Fancy software aside, having a plan on what you will be posting and when will make the biggest difference to your success.
Subscribe to some digital marketing blogs. Getting to know some fundamental online marketing basics will help you to learn more about how to develop your brand identity.
After all, you already know how to plan a stunning event—make sure that your online content is just as eye-catching.
