• One billion hours of video viewed on YouTube every day
• Over 500 million people are watching video on Facebook daily
• Time spent watching video on Instagram is up more than 80% year over year
• Videos are six times more likely to be retweeted on Twitter than photos, and three times more likely to receive retweets than GIFs
• Snapchat has 10 billion daily video views

Here’s how video marketing can boost your social media marketing plan for events:

1. Broadcast live and get more attention

Using the ‘Facebook Live’ feature, you can broadcast videos to your audience in real-time. Apart from Facebook, social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Periscope also provide the live video feature.  You can rope in your event’s performing artists and use this feature for promotion in the run-up to the event.

According to Facebook, users spend 3x more time watching live videos than videos that aren’t broadcast in real-time.  Your Facebook followers automatically opt-in to get notifications when you are “going live” which further increases visibility. Once your live broadcast is complete, you can upload the video to your timeline for those users who missed it. This feature is also helpful to give a sneak peek of your event to potential attendees who might show interest at a later point in time.

2. Grab attention early and sell tickets quickly

It’s important to grab the attention of your audience within the first 10 seconds or less, failing which they’ll stop watching your videos and move on. Within the first few seconds, you must convey the purpose of the video to your viewers and also offer some interesting information about your event, like early-bird discounts, and offer for meet-n-greet with artists, etc. You should capture interest during the first or second frame of the video before users have a chance to scroll away.

3. Optimize for search to garner more views

As you would have noticed, most social media platforms have inbuilt search options wherein you can search using terms such as hashtags. Consequently, make sure that your videos are SEO optimized to get noticed in the search engines of these platforms as well as external search engines. To make sure your videos are optimized, add proper headline and description to your video posts. Also, add relevant hashtags on Twitter and Instagram to boost search results. On YouTube, apart from the title and description you can add keyword tags to your videos.

4. Keep clear call-to-action in your videos

A call-to-action is an invitation to your viewers to take action which is why you should end your videos with a bang. Video content marketing needs to garner certain user actions, whether it is getting them to visit your event, share your video, or purchase an event ticket. The most effective place to add a call-to-action in your video is at the end. While creating videos, you must define a proper flow viz. ‘Introduction – Content – Call-to-action’. Keeping call-to-action at the end helps to motivate them to take your desired action.

5. Take your audience behind the scenes

The reason your audience follow you on social media is to know you better and get glimpses of how you run your business. When you do the latter, they connect with your brand. Once they get connected to your brand, it improves brand loyalty which is vital to growing your business.

So, showing videos such as behind-the-scenes, artists performing rehearsals, or the crew setting up the event – can garner interest and brand familiarity as well as engage your audience.

6. Capitalize on trending topics and hashtags to boost engagement

Like all other posts on social media, you need to leverage trending hashtags and topics while posting your videos. Capitalizing on these can help you connect with your audience regularly and eventually lead to fulfilling 3 content-goals. Delivering content that interests your audience, increase engagement level, and boost the number of views for your videos.

7. Run video ads to a targeted audience

You can run video ads to a targeted audience, including relevant users whom you haven’t already connected with on social media and get them excited about your upcoming events. Marketing videos on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all have ad options that focus on increasing  views and engagement.

If you want to be sure about your video ad campaign, make sure your YouTube marketing is on point. If you get good engagement and views after posting a video on your page, you are more likely to get better results when you turn that video into a video ad campaign. It will eventually help you save a lot of money, which you can otherwise use to promote your event on other channels.

To sum up

After having implemented the above elements if you do not check the performance of your videos, all efforts go in vain. Monitor video analytics components such as the number of views, reach, average view completion rate, average view duration, etc. – to keep a tab on the effectiveness of your videos.

To sum up, video marketing stands out as one of the most in-demand forms of marketing currently. If you aren’t including videos in your social media mix right now, you are incurring a lost opportunity.

The post 7 Ways to Leverage Video Marketing for your Events appeared first on Yapsody.

Writing for whom and what

The foremost thing before writing a blog is to figure out what and for whom you are going to write. Know your target audience and what they seek for. Keep their interest in mind while writing. Your blog can be solution-based; tweak the blog in such a way that you are answering their queries but it must not end up like a ‘Question-Answer’ round. It can talk about the nature of event, what the audience can expect, or facilities they will get. The blog can also be about some great newsworthy happenings relevant to your event, and interviews with performers or speakers.

Catchy Headline

In the content game, headline is the most integral part. Readers set their eyes first on the headline and if it succeeds in grabbing the eye-balls, they proceed to the body of the blog. So, having a catchy headline for your event blog is a must. It should suggest what the blog is all about.

Body Construction

Proceeding further from headline, the body of your blog should be well-structured with proper sub-heading and text. It should answer who, what, why, when, where, and how.

To separate your paragraphs, and make it more organised and clear, use sub-headings. Even a 300 words blog would appear lengthy if there’s no sub-heading to break the paragraphs. Also, it would make it easy to read. Use important points of each paragraph to create sub-heading.

Featured images, videos or graphics go a long way in making the blog appealing.

Maintain a friendly and conversational tone.

Include a call to action link in some of your blogs for people to register for the event or link to event ticketing system. On clicking the link, it should take to the registration page.

Make your blog tweetable by including a 140 character engaging sentence or quotes for readers to share on Twitter.

How Long it should be

Nobody has time to read a lengthy content. Even if the blog looks interesting, on seeing its length, it will kill the interest of any reader. Keep the blog word count between 500 and 600. It should be short but informative.

Making it Shareable

Make your blog shareable by including social share button at the end of your write-up. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, or Pinterest, use all the popular ones to get your blog shared.

The post Five Fascinating Ideas for Effective Event Blog Posts appeared first on Yapsody.