How to Promote Your Technology Conference Event Using Social Media

One of the guys I work with is involved with the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference. He had asked me about some ideas for promoting their 33rd Annual Software Quality Conference held October 12 through the 14th in Portland. Well I’m not an expert in conference event marketing by any stretch of the imagination but I do know how to do research, what appeals to me as an IT professional and how to present information. I found a lot of good information about how to market your conference event using social media so I’m sharing it in a two-part post. Here’s part one.

Note: The information presented here is a combination of others work and my own ideas. I’ve noted the sources where I directly copied information.

Lay the Ground Work

1. Create a hashtag for your event. Make it short and easy to remember. Balance the uniqueness of using a “year” designation in the tag vs. the ability to use the tag for events held in future years. Include the hashtag on all tweets. For instance, do you want to use #EventName15 to identify this year’s event? Or #EventName to be more generic and allow for future use? I’m not sure which is best.

2. Create a template with branded images and consistent color palette to make it easy to share quotes, comments and other information about the event in a consistent, branded manner. Include these images with each tweet in a manner in which the image is displayed in its entirety and doesn't require the user to click on a link

3. Try to include an image in each tweet. Besides the events logo or graphic, you might include a vista of the city in which the event is taking place or the venue in which it is held.

4. About 3-4 weeks before the event, add information about the event to the email signatures of all those people who are organizing the event or otherwise involved.

Share Information about the Event

5. Call out agenda items in a tweet and include a link to conference tracks.

6. Share news and other content related to the topic of the event

7. Share photos of the event’s venue and the setup of the event

8. If it’s a multi-day event, include tweets about any events held in the evening. Or Local Things to Do in the evening if no event-sponsored activities are planned.

9. Respond to any inquiries about the event and consider re-tweeting and favoriting tweets made by others.

10. If financially feasible, hold a contest for everyone who tweets about the event and give away a ticket or two

Use What You Already Have

11. Either link to existing pages or consider creating a page on your web site with information about last year’s event. Then tweet information about this year’s event and the link to that page

12. Create a page on your web site with information about last year’s event and tweet information about this year’s event and the link to that page.

Share Content from Previous Year’s Events.

13. Tweet info about the conference/event on a daily basis; better yet several times a day: morning, noon and night. You have a better chance at reaching people who operate on different time cycles. Just mix up the tweets as suggested later in this post.

14. Do you have any good comments from previous events? Maybe you’ve interviewed attendees or speakers and captured statements of excitement about specific sessions, speakers or your event in general.

Hashtag It Danno!

15. Include a hashtag pertaining to the general content of the event on EVERY tweet. There are several good tools out there to help you ascertain the good tags. Here are some good sites:

https://ritetag.com
http://topsy.com
http://hashtagify.me/
https://www.hashtags.org/

It’s Halftime

So there’s the first half of what I came up with on How to Promote Your Technology Conference Event Using Social Media. I’ll post the second half tomorrow. If you’re interested in conferences and events related to healthcare information technology, consider following @HITConfGuy on Twitter.