By Hugo Crispim, head of social media, Socialbakers

Using social media to promote your business events is a great opportunity to increase your brand awareness and engage with your community. However, many marketers wonder how to do it properly. We compiled five proven strategies to help you get the most out of leveraging your events to create meaningful content.

Start with your team

The events you host usually bring teams across departments together. After all, many people from your company are working hand-in-hand behind the scenes, making the event happen. Appointing your employees as brand ambassadors and involving them in running your social media profiles can help present the event from a unique perspective. Just make sure you create content your teams will want to share!

Create and schedule your content in advance

The beauty of promoting your events in real-time lies in knowing what’s coming. You know the highlights of the event and you know exactly when they will happen. That’s why you should create and schedule all of your core content accordingly. This will provide you with a lot of free time during the event, enabling you to react faster to the discussed trends and topics in real-time.

Nothing is more important than timing

What you publish is equally important to when you publish. If you tweet about something that hasn’t yet happened during the event, you will not get the engagement that this piece of content deserves. Similarly, if you publish too late (after other people have already talked about it) you won’t receive the maximum number of interactions. Things move fast during an event as the conversations unfold on social media. After all, there’s a lot happening at once, and conversations change rapidly. That’s why it’s crucial to get the timing of your posts right.

Don’t just create content, join conversations

During the event, try not focus entirely on publishing your content. Listen to what people are talking about, and join in on the conversations. Reporting on an event in real-time allows companies to connect most with their audiences without coming across as intrusive. Think of it this way: you can pretty much talk about anything that happens during your event because you’re the host.

Experiment with new social media networks and apps

Keeping your community updated on your events in real-time is a perfect opportunity to get creative. Most likely, you would be happy to be active on Snapchat or Periscope or publish Facebook Live videos daily, which isn’t always possible. It’s not every day that you have content that fits these new social channels or that you can report on something extraordinary happening in the office. Events can provide you with plenty of interesting content. It’s also ideal for kicking off a new social channel or testing a new content format. 

Even though these steps might sound challenging, following them can help to greatly boost your brand awareness.