Are you using LinkedIn to get the word out?

Why LinkedIn?

LinkedIn, the largest professional social network now with over 135,000,000 members, has been busy lately updating features to help professionals and companies.

The LinkedIn Events Tool is the most recent application to receive an overhaul as millions of members have been increasingly utilizing the tool to source and sign up to attend local or industry-related events. The new features of the LinkedIn Events Tool benefit event organizers, marketers and professionals alike.

You must be creative and target your promotional efforts to your core audience, and the new LinkedIn Events Tool can help you do just that!

One of the new features of the LinkedIn Events Tool is the ability for people to easily search for relevant events. LinkedIn will automatically showcase a handful of events related to your network connections, industry and geographic location, but the search tool can uncover many more events that you may be interested in.

With the search tool, you can home in on specific industries and geographic locations, and include “past events” in the search results.

A search for "upcoming marketing and advertising events in California" produced 27 results.

When creating an event on LinkedIn, don’t limit yourself to traditional events and conferences! Roundtables, breakfast meetings, workshops and even virtual webinars are all appropriate for utilizing the LinkedIn Events Tool. In fact, hosting a regular monthly event is a great way to consistently build visibility and value with your target audience!

5 Tips for Creating and Optimizing Your LinkedIn Event

#1: Upload an event logo

One of the first things I noticed when doing detailed event searches was that almost none of them include logos. This causes all of the events to look alike! It’s important to optimize your LinkedIn event to ensure that it will stand out among all of the other search results, and an event logo will provide a substantial boost to differentiating your event!

#2: Get creative with your event title

Think of an exciting way to describe your event that will appeal to potential attendees. What’s in it for them? What will they gain from attending your event? Developing a creative title will help your event stand out in search results and also capture more attention as you share it online and attendees share it online with their networks!

#3: Include a short but powerful event description with a strong call to action

Many events on LinkedIn have long and detailed descriptions. I would recommend saving that for your offsite event registration page perhaps. Keep your event description on LinkedIn focused on the high points.

Use capital letters and bullet points to highlight the benefits of attending the event and don’t forget to instruct visitors to click the I’m Attending or Follow buttons so that their network connections will see this action!

#4: Consider using an offsite registration page to capture attendee information

When you create your event, you will be asked to enter the URL where attendees can sign up. Using an offsite event registration tool such as Eventbrite or Go to Meeting  will allow you to have greater control over your attendees’ information and enable you to communicate with them via email.

#5: Don’t forget the details

Be sure to include event date, time and location, and if it’s a virtual event, check the “virtual event” box! Also, take advantage of the Labels section and include keywords that describe your event.

An example of an event that is properly optimized with details, logo, highlights and labels.

5 Tips to Successfully Promote and Share Your LinkedIn Event

Once you’ve created your event on LinkedIn, the real work begins. Now you will need to drive visibility and grow your attendance!

If you create an event on LinkedIn and neglect to do any promotion, you most likely will have an empty event. Promoting your event is the key to gaining traction and visibility.

In addition, the more attendees you can capture through your LinkedIn Events Page, the more opportunities they will have to meet new people and network with other attendees. The new LinkedIn Events Tool will showcase the “Attendees You May Want to Meet”!

The LinkedIn Events Tool produces a valuable onsite networking benefit for your attendees.

Remember, when promoting your event, you must also encourage attendees and potential attendees to click the I’m Attending button on your LinkedIn Events Page in order for it to show up as a status update in their respective LinkedIn connections! Tell them what you want them to do.

In your event description, I recommend using a strong call to action to encourage visitors to click the I'm Attending or Follow buttons.

#1: Promote your event on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook

On your LinkedIn Events Page, you will have the ability to grab a link to the page and promote it on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Always promote your event by stating the primary benefit that your target audience can expect to receive from attending the event! How is it going to help them grow their business or be more successful?

Encourage attendees and non-attendees alike to also promote the event for you. Simply stating something like, “Please help us spread the word” can go a long way in social media promotion efforts!

Grab your LinkedIn Event link and share it on social networks.

#2: Promote your event weekly in relevant LinkedIn groups

I ran a LinkedIn event several months ago and primarily focused my promotional activities on highly relevant LinkedIn groups. These are the places where clusters of professionals hang out together and discuss mutual topics of interest. It is the perfect place to promote events that may be of interest to those members.

I would recommend promoting your event weekly until there is a day or so left to register, and also promote it at that time, offering one last opportunity to sign up. People tend to act when time is running out!

If members are receiving weekly or daily digests from their LinkedIn groups, your event will show as a current discussion!

#3: Promote your event on your LinkedIn Company Page

If you have a LinkedIn Company Page for your business, you can now add status updates that will be visible to your Company Page followers. Review this recent article for more information on how to leverage the new LinkedIn Company Pages to grow your business.

#4: Send direct and personalized invites

When you choose to share an event on LinkedIn, you can send a direct message about it to any of your connections. This is a great way to get the event directly in front of attendees who may be interested in attending with a personalized message. It’s also an excuse for you to reach out to connections with whom you may have lost touch.

Send personalized invites to your connections.

#5: Run ads on LinkedIn to promote your event

Running targeted ads on LinkedIn is proving to be quite effective. Depending on your budget, you may want to consider developing a targeted social ad strategy to drive attendance to your event!

Don’t limit your promotional efforts. Take advantage of all of the opportunities available to you for leveraging your event with social tools and channels. Here are 12 ways to market and promote your event through social media and 15 awesome ways to “socialize” your events!

Find Related and Relevant Events to Follow or Attend

Keep in mind that by following events that your connections are attending, events in your industry or events in your geographic area, you can network with other professionals involved in those events without physically attending. You can also share information about your event on other event pages! 

There are a number of events I’m interested in attending but for one reason or another may not be able to make it. In these cases, I will follow the event to stay in the loop and also network with the people who are planning to attend, perhaps by asking their opinion about the event or their experience from attending in the past!

If you’d like to see all LinkedIn Events at a glance, check out the LinkedIn Events Directory; an aggregate web page that organizes events by industry, geography and event name: http://events.linkedin.com/. I suspect that more events will be coming online on LinkedIn as companies and professionals realize the opportunities available to them by using the LinkedIn Events Tool.

LinkedIn comprehensive online events directory.

What do you think? Now that you know more about the new LinkedIn Events Tool, will you use it to create, promote and grow your events? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Social media enables event attendees to connect in powerful ways. Social media can help promote events and empower attendees to share.

This article will reveal 15 ways you can infuse social media into your events.

Creating Pre-Event Buzz

#1: Registration Buzz

You don’t have to wait until the day of your event to create a buzz—it can start at the registration stage. Services such as Eventbrite let your attendees share the event with their networks as they register.

#2: Sharing Buzz

Encourage your attendees to share details of your event early by offering incentives for spreading the word. Meteor Solutions helps you to incentivize your event by offering rewards for sharing your content.

The Online Marketing Summit 2012 is offering the chance to win a free trip to San Diego by sharing their event.

OMS is giving away a free trip to San Diego for spreading the word about the event.

South by Southwest (SXSW) goes one step further with SXSocial, their own registrant tool which allows attendees to get to know like-minded users and exchange messages before the event.

The entire front page of the TEDx SoMa Event is dedicated to pre-registering and sharing information about the next event: all their blogs, Twitter feed, Facebook fans, Flickr and YouTube channels are up there to excite next year’s attendees, with your attention directed towards the large ‘pre-register’ button.

TEDxSoMa does a good job at highlighting their content socially, as well as the opportunities to share their content.

Make sure all your event promotions include pre-agreed hashtags in prominent positions to encourage people to start using them early when they talk about your event. You don’t want two or three variations getting coined as it will be much harder to follow conversation threads.

OMS features their event's hashtag up front and center.

Once you’ve got your speakers lined up you can include their profiles—and Twitter handles—on your website and other promotions, which will help your audience get to know them if they don’t already and even start suggesting questions and topics that might help your speakers gauge the audience better.

#3: Event-Shaping Buzz

SXSW has always been active in asking attendees for their views to help shape events, with 30% of their programming chosen by attendees. Without going to these lengths, you can use PollDaddy and TwtPoll to conduct simple polls before your event.

SXSW crowd is buzzing with excitement.

#4: Rumor Buzz

In 2009 a rumor flew around Twitter that comedian Dave Chappell would be playing a secret midnight show at Portland’s Pioneer Square. No-one was able to confirm or deny the rumor, so it just kept running until 5,000 people had showed up.

Midnight came and went, and no Dave Chappell. Still, people kept arriving. Had the Twitter rumor just been a massive hoax? At 1 am, just as everyone was starting to think they’d been victims of a Twitter con, Dave Chappell walked on stage and rewarded the crowd with an impromptu gig.

Rumors of surprise special guests or exciting prizes can help to invigorate your event and get people talking.

Crowd going crazy when the Dave Chappelle rumor is confirmed by his appearance.

Keeping Attendees Informed

#5: Use QR Codes for Ad-Hoc Presentations

Nowadays it doesn’t matter how ad-hoc your event is. Even if it’s being held outside with no traditional conference facilities, you can use QR codes to share your presentation without a projector by uploading your presentation to Slideshare, then creating a QR code that points to the presentation. Print an image of the code and anyone with a smartphone can scan it and go straight to the presentation.

Example of QR codes used to download a presentation.

#6: Collect All of Your Speakers’ Blogs in One Place

How do you keep your attendees up to date with all your speakers’ news, whether before, during or after the event? With Netvibes, you can use the RSS feeds from their blogs to create a dashboard of all their latest posts.

Netvibes can also be used to round up Twitter conversations, which is particularly useful at large events if there are several different hashtags being used.

Netvibes' conversation feed.

Helping Attendees Share Information

#7: Twitter Backchannels

There’s no need to stick to the rigid format of talking, then opening up to questions from the audience. With a Twitter backchannel run on something like Tweetwally, not only can the audience provide commentary on the talks, but also non-attendees can follow along on Twitter.

There can be issues around this, though: running commentary behind the speaker can be distracting and as the format isn’t censored, comments could go off-topic or even turn negative. A good solution is to have a screen up in a communal area away from the live events, with marshals collecting comments and feedback to put to the speaker at an appropriate time.

#8: Sharing Images

By setting up an official Flickr page and using small prizes and incentives to encourage participants to upload their own photos, you can quickly build a great unofficial photo record of the event, which you can use again in future promotions.

#9: Sharing Locations

Encourage attendees to check in using Foursquare at different locations around the venue by rewarding them with discounts, special offers and other incentives. Not only can everyone see which booths are popular, but also you can encourage them to explore locations that they might otherwise have missed.

Absent Attendees

#10: Open Up Your Event to Virtual Attendees

If you don’t want space to limit your attendance, consider opening your event up to virtual attendees.

The 2011 Blog World and New Media Expo is selling virtual tickets for anyone not able to physically get to LA.

BlogWorld is offering recordings of presentations for a smaller fee to those who can't attend.

Some events, such as the 2011 International Freelancers Day Conference go one step further and are entirely virtual, with speakers recording sessions miles apart, cutting the need for a conference venue, travel or accommodation. Virtual attendees can ask questions via Twitter or Facebook, or comment on events using hashtags to create what is potentially a global conversation.

#11: Video Streaming

Live recording is the keystone to a virtual event. UStream, Facebook or a dedicated YouTube channel can enable you to stream events live, either in whole or in part. This is particularly valuable at large events where attendees are never going to get around to all the talks. If you’re going to do this on a large scale, it’s worth investing in dedicated recording equipment and a separate Internet connection, as you’ll be using a lot of bandwidth.

Energize Your Event

#12: QR Code Scavenger Hunts

How can you make visiting your booth more fun and stand out in a busy venue? This year’s Comic-Con in San Diego used QR codes to create a Voltron-themed scavenger hunt for fans to win prizes. At the same event, BBC America ran their own Doctor Who QR game to encourage attendees to visit all of their Doctor Who exhibits, with the chance to win related prize-packs.

Comic-Con is always buzzing with activity.

Doctor Who QR game.

Reward your attendees for sharing blog posts, weblogs and photo galleries at your event with prizes and discounts. The MarketingProf’s B2B Forum offered free tickets to next year’s event for the best content posted to their blog.

After the Event

#13: Publish Your Twitter Wall

If you have a whole lot of media you don’t know what to do with, try using Storify to collect Tweets, videos and photos and embed them in your website or share them through social media.

#14: Give Access to All of Your Talks With Links to Videos

You can make your website the main place for post-event catch-up by using Ustream and YouTube to embed video of your biggest events. This can also serve as a great marketing tool for next year’s event.

Make sure you have an email sign-up (you can use AWeber or MailChimp) on the same page to capture interest, and you can even get ahead of the game by offering incentives for early interest.

X.commerce is a new and innovative distribution channel.

#15: Publish Your Presentations

You can use Slideshare to reach a whole new audience beyond your own website and help convince new audiences to sign up for next year’s event.

What do you think? How have you promoted your event? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Mark shares how SAP’s community of 2 million members from 200 countries is organized around business roles (such as developers, IT professionals and business process experts) to better engage with customers.

You’ll find out how SAP puts together content focused on specific needs to build their community. Listen to the tips to learn how you can get customers to participate in your community.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• How to get your customers to participate in your community
• The value in providing a platform where customers can get answers to their questions
• Why you need to look at customers as individuals and not brand accounts
• How to use Twitter to build your community
• How to use social media to give customers a platform for discussion
• How Twitter can improve your event marketing

And listen for these hot tips to get your customers involved in your online community:

• Find a problem, focus on solving that one issue and expand from there
• Do a lot of listening and responding; use the feedback to move you forward
• Expect to have a learning curve

Connect with Mark on Twitter @markyolton and check out the SAP Community Network which everyone is welcome to join.

Do you use social communities to connect with your customers? What tips do you have to share? Please leave them below.

The trick is to know which social media tools to use and when to use them.  This article contains 12 useful social media tips designed to help your events shine.

Before Your Event

The first step is to make people aware of your event, to mark it on their calendar, and to

register. Here’s the game plan:

#1: Market Your Event Through Twitter

There are many ways in which you can use Twitter to raise awareness. Many conferences and events have their own hashtags, such as #smss10 or #metweetup. There’s no magic to creating one—just start using a hashtag in all your related tweets and encourage other people to do the same when talking about your event.

To encourage people to tweet out your hashtag and spread the word, sweeten the deal with a free pass, door prize or other giveaway for one lucky hashtag-er.

If your event is large enough, give it its own Twitter account such as @Blogworld or @socialmediaFTW, which serves as a customer service “hotline” and adds credibility to the event.

Mix up your event tweets by varying the message.

Mix up your event tweets by varying the message.

Constantly tweeting that your event is coming will annoy some of your followers, so mix it up: use tweets to announce new sponsors, speakers, an open bar, or to ask questions that might help shape the event.

Finally, ask for people to share your event with the simple phrase, “Please RT!” You’ll be amazed at the results. Just don’t overdo it; you don’t want to look desperate, do you?

Be sure to check out Cindy King’s post How to Use Twitter Events to Grow Your Network for more ideas.

#2: Market Your Event Through Facebook

Certainly you can update your status with news of your event, but don’t overlook Facebook Events, which Facebook guru Mari Smith calls “one of the most powerful tools on the platform.”

A page for your event attracts fans.

I’ve found success by first creating a page for the event, and then creating a “Facebook Event” from that. This is especially helpful if you have a recurring event, such as an annual conference or a tweetup, as it helps build a fan base over time.

A page for your event attracts fans.

Other benefits of creating a Facebook page include:

• You can add a “Like Box” to your website, blog or other web presence to promote your clambake.
• You can invite fans as well as friends to the March on Washington.
• You can take out targeted Facebook ads to reach people outside your network who would be interested in your Save the Whales Sit-In.

Mari Smith delves deeper in her post, 10 Tips for Creating Buzz with Facebook Events.

#3: Market Your Event Through LinkedIn

Promote business functions with LinkedIn Events to reach your professional network. As Lewis Howes points out in his excellent post, Top 5 Ways to Market Your Business with LinkedIn, “once someone RSVPs to your event, it shows up on the home profile of everyone that person is connected to, spreading the message for you.”

It’s simple and straightforward to create an event on LinkedIn. Once you’ve completed that task, it’s just as easy to invite up to 50 people from your LinkedIn network. It also shows up in the events search.

#4: Market Your Event Through Your Blog

Whether through an existing blog or a blog created specifically for your gathering, be sure to create posts announcing the event, calls for presenters, and sponsorship opportunities. Follow up with guest posts from presenters who should welcome the opportunity to reach a wider audience (and steal people who might have attended competing events!).

#5: Other Places to Market Online

There are plenty of online calendars, and you should list your event in any that seem appropriate.

Local papers, TV channels and radio stations’ websites often host a calendar of events that offer free postings. Tweetvite is a site for promoting and learning about tweetups, and Eventful is one of many sites where you can list all types of gatherings.

#6: Event Marketing and Registration Tools

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when handling online registration for your event. Eventbrite is a highly popular tool for the social media crowd, and Constant Contact, the popular email marketing company, has recently entered the market with their own competing product.

With these tools you can create and market your event, and even collect payments with registration. Registration forms appear on the event marketing company’s site and can be embedded into your website or blog.

Sharing tools let attendees post to Facebook and Twitter, which builds buzz and generates more registrations.

During Your Event

Just because your event has started doesn’t mean the marketing has ended! If you’re promoting an all-day affair like a boat show or arts in the park, people will be milling in and out all day. Keep the excitement and foot traffic high by leveraging social media well into the night.

#7: Foursquare and Gowalla

Events on Foursquare will encourage attendees to share.

It costs nothing to create an event in Foursquare or Gowalla, and attendees who are hip to location-based apps will want to check in to your event for the extra points!

Since many people link their Foursquare and Gowalla activity to Twitter and Facebook, check-ins reach well beyond early adopters of location-based apps.

Events on Foursquare will encourage attendees to share.

You can greatly increase the number of check-ins by adding signs and table-top displays reminding people to check in, and even sweeten the deal with a giveaway or random drawing.

#8: Use Those Hashtags!

Hashtags make your event more findable, searchable and memorable.

People will tweet out memorable lines from your event, so make sure everyone knows the Twitter hashtag: put it in your literature, on name tags, and announce it during your keynote.

Hashtags make your event more findable, searchable and memorable.

For more on how to leverage hashtags, be sure to read Adam Vincenzini’s post Live Events Need Twitter #Hashtags ‘Built-In’ Not ‘Bolted-On’.

#9: Live Blogging

If you’re putting on a conference, it might be worthwhile to have someone “live blog” the sessions. Instead of just taking notes, have them take notes straight into a blog post and publish it as soon as the session ends.

#10: A Picture Says a Thousand Words

Although Twitpics and iPhone photos are great and shareable, hire a photographer for the day. If you can’t afford one, consider an in-kind trade of a free pass. Make sure you come to an agreement on who owns the photos and how they can be used online to promote this and future events.

#11: Thoughts on Video

There are so many ways to use video at your event: quick interviews with attendees and speakers on Flip cams, recorded sessions, or live streaming the event with UStream.tv.

#12: After Your Event

After the glow of a successful comic book convention, bean supper or Tri for a Cure fades, it’s time to get back to work.

Create a blog post of your reflections on how the event went, what you learned, and even how the next one could rock even harder.  Ask for feedback and suggestions in the comments field. Post something similar to your Facebook page and encourage fans and friends to leave comments there as well.

Upload your photos to Flickr and other photo sharing sites and be sure to give them appropriate titles, descriptions and tags. Use the Creative Commons license to let them be shared as far and wide as possible.

After you’ve finished uploading your photos to Facebook be sure to tag everyone you know and ask them to “fill in the blanks” by tagging anyone else. This can have a viral effect as people love seeing photos of themselves and their friends, driving them all back to your Facebook page.

Post video to YouTube, Facebook and other video sharing sites. Ask your presenters to share their slides on Slideshare, again with appropriate tags, titles and links.

Wrapping Up

Undoubtedly, there are more sites and techniques to promote your event through social media. What platforms do you use, what techniques have proven especially effective, and how did you generate excitement and fill the seats at your last event?

When setting up the event as an organizer, I highly recommend you leave all the default settings the way they are – that is, allow guests to invite others, upload photos, write on the wall, etc. The reason is that every one of these activities creates news items that go out into the feeds of those individuals and their friends. This is great viral visibility for you and for them. Here is an example of all options you want to check:

And, as an attendee of any event on Facebook, you can easily help create buzz and visibility for both yourself and the event organizer. Win:win!

I do recommend being strategic and mindful about the events you RSVP for. (I’m sure, like me, you get your fair share of non-relevant event invitations!)

Also, when setting up your own events, be sure to choose a really catchy title, subtitle and photo. These three fields are the only ones seen in “Requests” when you invite your friends (and they invite their friends). The small greeting you can include goes out in the email notification, so that’s important too.

Here are my top nine tips for creating buzz as a Facebook Event attendee and/or host.

1.  Always RSVP

If you are attending an event, make sure to RSVP and write a message in the box on the “Request” page.  Here is an example of a personal invite to an event.  The invitee could then write a reply in the box below. If you want to punch it up a bit, you can even record a short video from your computer, letting your friend know you are excited to attend their event.  And then all you need to do is click on the video icon and upload it!

2. Get Noticed

If you RSVP to an event, make sure to write a note on the event wall – whether your RSVP is a yes, no or maybe.  This is great visibility for you!

Also, if it is your event, continue to generate buzz by periodically commenting on your own event wall. When people RSVP and write on your event wall, go write on their wall to thank them personally. Comment on any added photos/videos/links. Each of these activities goes into your mini feed and your friends’ news feeds. I call this strategy “RSV” – radical, strategic visibility.

3. Upload Photos

Make sure to choose an engaging photo for your main event description and add multiple photos related to the event to pique interest.  An engaging photo should be eye-catching, warm, friendly, and inviting. Typically a person’s face is better than logos/images/graphics. You MUST include a photo or your event will have that nasty question mark. And who wants to attend a “?” event?

4. Upload Videos and Links

As mentioned in tip #1, you can record a video and upload it to any of your RSVPs.  If it is your event, you can make a short video explaining what your event is about and upload it to the invite. And just like photos and videos, links are a great way to offer more value as well.  You will want to make sure you include a link for your participants to register if you have an opt-in strategy.  Make this very clear to your participants.

5. Write a Personal Message

This makes your event more personable.  Most people have their email notifications turned on and they’ll get an email with your event title, date, time and your personal message. I also recommend including the time zone in the personal message, because Facebook defaults to your own time zone.

6. Send Out Invites

Click on “Invite People to Come” and invite your friends. This invitation will go into your friends’ “Event Requests.”

7. Spread the Word

Click the “Share” button and “Post to your Profile” and your invite will go on your wall for all to see.

Or use the “Share” button to send an invite to specific friends or lists.

This is my rule (you may want to test your own parameters): I only promote about one event of my own on Facebook every month, so I don’t have any qualms about inviting all friends because my events are virtual (conference calls).  (In this case, I would use tip #6 above and “Invite People to Come” and “Select All” to invite everyone.) For location-specific events, you may want to be more selective.

8.  Tweet About Your Event

Send out tweets with a link to the Facebook event. Preferably not just, “Check out my event! [insert link].” Rather, offer something enticing like, “Learn How to Create a BUZZ With Facebook Events [insert link—use a short URL].”  (Link to either the Facebook Event page or your registration page.)

Also include the link in your Facebook status updates periodically and mention your event on Plurk, LinkedIn, Plaxo, FriendFeed, Ping.fm – whichever platforms you’re active on and have followers/friends! Your friends and followers will happily pass the snipped link on for you.

9.  Experiment With Social Ads

Promote your event with Social Ads and every time someone RSVPs, their name and photo may appear alongside your ad. Experiment with a weekly/monthly budget and see what happens.

10. Send Out Reminders

As the event date approaches, be sure to gently remind people who have not yet registered that there’s still time.

Wow, that was a lot to cover!  I hope you find value in these tips!

What do you think? Did you learn something new about Facebook Events? What has your experience been so far with Facebook Events? Share your thoughts in the Comments box below.