Managing events when they’re promoted on social media

CMI organise hundreds of events per year, whilst my future employers IQPC also put on a significant number of events around the world, so it's fair to say that promoting events has been a big part of my career recently.

Obviously any event organiser wants to get as many people attending their event as possible, and social media offers many opportunities to generate awareness of your event.

For instance Facebook has an events tool, LinkedIn recently announced an update to their own events section, whilst you have sites such as Eventbrite that are dedicated to events.

Now in isolation all of these tools are fantastic and offer a lot of functionality.  The problem is that each of them does tend to operate in isolation, which if you use proprietary event management systems can be a bit of a problem.  For instance how do you deal with someone that's signed up via Facebook but not your own system?  How do you ensure that your delegate list is de-duped when people are potentially signing up in multiple places?

I think if done well these sites have tremendous potential for extending the reach of your events, so this blog will hopefully help event marketers utilise the tools provided by social media whilst maintaining the integrity of their own event management system.

So lets look at each tool and see how well they work together.

LinkedIn Events

LinkedIn events is probably the easiest tool to use in conjunction with your own event management system.  As part of the event setup you can give the event a url and identify that registration for the event has to happen on your own website.

That way you keep many of the social aspects offered by LinkedIn, whilst ensuring that your data is kept nice and tidy.

EventBrite

Now it was recently announced that EventBrite will be teaming up with LinkedIn so that a lot of the events listed on EventBrite will be available via the new LinkedIn Events area.  At the time of writing EventBrite don't offer an export function, although depending on the CMS you use you can connect up EventBrite with your website.  For instance both Drupal and WordPress have EventBrite modules that let people book events from your website.

However they have such a wealth of features, such as At The Door, which combined with things such as the affiliate scheme that's built into your event make it a platform that you really can't do without.  

You will however have to manually move customers over to your own database so that your own records are in order (unless you use the WordPress/Drupal plugins).

Facebook

Personally speaking I don't think the Facebook events tab should be used for anything but birthday parties and other such social events between friends.  However it is possible to add EventBrite to your Facebook Page events area using an AppBistro app.  Once setup you’ll be able to select any live event from your Eventbrite account using a drop down menu. Instantaneously your Event Title, Ticket/Registration Options, Event Details, When, and Where will all patch over directly to your Facebook Page.

This is a much better option than using Facebooks own events system as you'll be therefore promoting your event across Facebook, LinkedIn and EventBrite in one go.  As above though you'll need to manually move any ticket sales for the event into your customer database.

Eventasaurus

A site that might make doing all of this much easier is Eventasaurus.  Like a “Tweetdeck for Events”, Eventasaurus connects the major event products and platforms online so you can control them all from one place. Eventasaurus automates a lot of your repeat tasks and brings your data together into one place for you to easily process including:

  • Create events on all the major social networks automatically.
  • View the definitive attendee list—from across all your event pages.
  • Be responsive and active on your event pages, without spending all day doing it.

Eventasaurus from sam collins on Vimeo.

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4 thoughts on “Managing events when they’re promoted on social media

    • It\’s set to launch in February Nick. I\’m meeting Sam from Eventasaurus next week so should have some more news then.

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