On a day to day basis, it’s easy to ebb and flow your social media efforts depending on what’s going on at your organization and how much engagement needs to be done with your community. But what about social media surrounding events? With Aspiration putting together so many events lately, (OSPcon, Open Subtitles Design Summit, Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, Nonprofit Software Dev. Summit), I thought I’d share what I thought were a few social media communications avenues to consider when holding an event.

Pre-Event

• Blog Post

  Be sure to announce your event on your blog ahead of time. This is the place to link to people and organizations who will be present, explain what the heck is going on and delve deeper than an elevator pitch.

• Facebook/Twitter posts

  Posting on Facebook and Twitter is a great way to get the buzz going. Talk about organizing and mention who is coming. “Getting the agenda sorted for #devsummit! Can’t wait to see @aspirationtech in action!” is just one example. 😉

  

  This is also a great place to start using a “tag” (or hashtag on Twitter) for the event. The (hash)tag will serve as a searchable keyword so that people can see what people are posting about your event specifically.

  

• Facebook Event

  Consider putting together a Facebook Event for your event. Acting as a sort of Facebook page for the event, you and event invitees are able to invite friends, see who’s coming, see who’s not coming and post to the event’s wall.

During the Event

• Wiki

  We here at Aspiration are a big fan of wikis at our major events. It not only acts as documentation for organizers, participants (and funders) but also gives your participants a place to make a contribution and share their content in a way that isn’t always feasible in an event setting.

  Have participants upload their notes and resources onto the wiki. Create a page on the wiki for “Related Communities” or “Related Projects” so that participants (and you) can expand the ecosystem and community around the event.



• Social Media Tag

  Encourage the use of your official event social media tag during the event proceedings. An effective tag can help you find content ranging from photos and videos to Facebook and Twitter posts all relating to your event because all you have to do is search for your event’s tag on social media sites.

• Social Media Dashboard

  A dashboard pulls search RSS feeds for keywords and your event tag into one place. This is a great visual representation of the “buzz” happening around your event and gives you a great place to point to when funders and board members ask “so how’d it go over?” Send out the link to your dashboard and let your participants get connected to other participants who are sharing related content and posts.

• Official Facebook/Twitter Posts

  Be sure to use your organizational (or work-related) Twitter and Facebook accounts to push out updates of your event as they happen. Notable quotes, crazy stuff that’s happened and especially “A-ha!” moments. Retweet other participants’ Twitter posts about the event. Get your social network on. Make some friends.

• Photos

  Take digital photos and upload them onto Flickr with your event tag. Upload them onto Facebook and tag the people you’re friends with. There is no more compelling ask than “Click here to check out this photo I took of you!” It’s pretty much a guaranteed click-through. Don’t forget to pull the Flickr feed for the event tag into your social media dashboard.

Post-Event

• Social Network Groups

  If it makes sense, consider setting up a Facebook Group, Twitter List or maybe event a LinkedIn group for participants to keep collaborating. This works especially well when participants are meeting around a specific topic/platform (vs. meeting to gain something like individual knowledge to take back to their organization).

What do you do to promote your events through social media?
What do you do during the events to keep up with the content?

Tell me what I’ve left out!