I won’t deny, social media definitely consumes a lot of time, and for busy people like y’all, it can wreck your schedule. But, there are ways to manage it, and here I’m going to explain five top ones:

ON THE CLOCK

Event planners practically live off clocks and calendars, so this shouldn’t be a tough one. When you sit down to post event updates on social media to sell your event tickets, you might get distracted really easily, especially when there’s always that ‘View 10 New Tweets’ and ‘20+ New Stories’ popping up again and again. To top it all, you now have push notifications on your smartphones for all twenty social media apps that you’ve installed.

Give specific time windows to these outlets and only be active on them during those intervals. First thing in the morning, plan out your social media ‘schedule’ and stick to it. Turning off your notifications will definitely work since you won’t feel the urge to go back every 10 minutes to check your feed and spend so much time on it. Also, make sure that whenever you’re working on a platform during the time allotted to it, work ONLY on it – create content, engage with your followers, interact with people and so on.

A LOT AT ONCE

Having pre-produced content in bulk always helps, because you won’t have to fidget with new ideas and find ways to execute them right at the eleventh hour. Whenever you manage to squirm a little time off, maybe just before you sleep, after you wake up, during breakfast, or while traveling, you can list out tips related to your industry and post them on Twitter. These same tips can be converted to infographics that you can post on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest (try using PicMonkey or Canva for the same) and also include your logo in these pictures to increase your branding.

Yes, content creation might take some time, but scheduling it is a cakewalk for an event planner, at least. Use apps like Hootsuite to schedule hourly Tweets, and follow a similar approach with Facebook posts as well.

SMALL IS BIG

When you have ideas on your mind, you want to jump into the implementation. And if you take a really big leap, you might just fall and break your head. This simply means that just because there are a hundred social media outlets out there, you don’t have to be on each one of them all at once. Instead, start with platforms that you’re familiar with, or the ones that are popular in your niche. Later, when you are smoothly managing these platforms and are still left with enough time to start promoting on others, you could expand to more channels.

HOW FREE IS FREE TIME?

As I already mentioned, you could use up your free time (or ‘dead’ time, as they call it) for following up on your social media accounts. This is usually the time where you anyway can’t do something else that’s really productive, for example, when you are waiting in the checkout queue at the supermarket, or waiting for someone at the restaurant before a meeting. You could utilize this time to check your feed, retweet people on Twitter, and you could also create new content using your phone.

SCHEDULE YOUR CONTENT

This is probably a continuation of the second point. For every kind of content that you want to put up online, you can have a rough idea in your mind about the where, when, and how. Divide your content into categories, and then plan how much from each one of it are you going to post in a day, or over a week. So, you won’t have to spend another hour contemplating the kind  of content you want to post, instead, you’ll have a domain that’ll give you a line of thinking when you’re considering what to post.

IN CONCLUSION

So, there you go. Now that you know it won’t be that difficult to manage your social media accounts, you can utilize that time you spent stressing out for coming up with new social media strategies, all the while keeping these five tips at the back of your head.

The post How To Effectively Manage Multiple Social Media Accounts appeared first on Yapsody.

Here’s how to promote an event successfully.

1.    Score Before More

If you haven’t reached your goal in terms of number of attendees, you tend to go “This is Sparrrttaaaa” and send out email invitations to each and every person on your contact list (sometimes, you even ask your friends to send those out to everyone on their contact list) which is a big, BIG mistake. Instead of inviting hundreds of people who are probably just attending to save lunch preparations back at home, you should focus on the more loyal ones. Use cool promotional event ideas and take time to send out personal invitations to them as the smallest token of thanks you can give them.

2.    Involve Event Participants

This is how marketing works – you tell ten people, each one of those ten people tell ten other people, and so on. The more stages you have, the more you tend to reach out. In the case of event marketing,  If you involve people from your organizing committee and keynote speakers in your event promotion strategies, you can increase your reach by a huge factor. And to pep them up, give your people incentives to promote the event. Here’s one of many event promotion examples – you can offer them a certain commission, or free hampers against the number of registrations they get.

3.    So-much-cial Media Promotion is Just Never Enough!

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and even MySpace – here’s how to promote an event on every social media platform that you have an account on. Swap your profile picture with your event poster on those accounts because these notifications tend to come up in the News Feeds more often than the usual promotional posts. Be active on these channels so that people don’t lose touch with your event. You don’t have to keep calling for action the whole time or you might sound desperate to your audience, instead try to engage them by putting up infographics, comics, pictures, videos, photos of keynotes, their bios, fun facts, behind-the-scenes, bloopers etc. related to your upcoming event. That’s how you promote your event successfully.

4.    Send Out Emails to Subscribers

Though point one tells you otherwise, give us a chance to explain – once you’re done sending personalized invites to your loyal attendees, you have to start sending out newsletters to the ones who are alleged subscribers. Your initial newsletter should contain the basic details of your event and a call-to-action. In subsequent newsletters, slash down the number of available tickets to arouse a sense of urgency amongst the receivers, so that they register their ticket online in a state of haste. Also, you have to make sure your emails don’t find their way to the spam folders. Here’s how –

• Instead of sending all the emails in one big batch, try to get your server to send one email at a time.
• Filter out the “bad” email accounts from your mailing list. These “bad” ones are those that have remained inactive for a long time and repeatedly sending them emails might increase your spam score.
• Make sure you provide an Unsubscribe link so that if people don’t wish to receive any more newsletters, they’ll unsubscribe instead of marking you as spam.
• Talk your followers into including your email address in their contacts to decrease your chances of getting into spam.

Now that you’ve learned how to dodge being spammed, compose newsletters that are to-the-point and answer most of the “wh-” questions. Make it colorful, but not to an extent where it loses professionalism. Also, it has been found that Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays (sometime around noon) witness the highest inbox opening rates, so send in your emails during these windows.

5.    Be Active on Discussion Forums

Contrary to popular belief, discussion forums are not just for fangirls and geeks. One of the cool event promotion ideas is to target a forum related to your event as part of your event marketing and start a thread about it, but be careful to not have a high sales pitch because it won’t be received warmly on discussion forums. Let it just be a friendly notification to make them aware of the existence of such an event, and if someone is genuinely interested, give specific responses. You can also get in touch with bloggers and provide them with good quality content in return for including a link to your event page and a call-to-action.

6.    Press Releases

They are basically open newsletters to attract the media. And here’s how undertake event promotion strategies like this –

• Even though it doesn’t seem like that, introduction paragraphs are supposed to contain all the necessary information you need to convey to your readers since rarely do people read the rest, anyway.
• Have loads of statistics, but make sure your press release doesn’t end up looking like a mathematics textbook.
• Include your contact details.
• Do NOT have a lot of technical jibber-jabber. Your press release is going to be validated by a media guy, and if he can’t understand it in the first place, he wouldn’t have a reason to believe that it’s good enough.

Yes, these might look like a lot for last-minute preps on how to promote an event, and I won’t lie to you, they ARE a lot. But, if you find yourself Googling how to sell last minute event tickets, we think you should start acting on them right away!

The post Six Last Minute Event Promotion Strategies appeared first on Yapsody.