S3E14: Social Media Marketing with Kiana Walsh

Planning an event is hard enough, but marketing an event to ensure that attendees are excited and attend the event is even harder. In this podcast episode, Kiana Walsh gives great detail on how to successfully recognize your event’s target market, how to market events on social media platforms specifically directed towards relevant age demographics, and explains how algorithms work on social media. If you are any sort of social media manager or use social media to plan your events, this episode is for you!

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Transcript

Dr. K: In the Intro to Events class, students have to show mastery of the design thinking process. Students are able to show this mastery in a variety of different ways such as designing a training video, a game, or even a podcast. They are able to choose any topic and organize their activity in any way that they want as long as they follow this design process. These student created podcasts have offered so many insights into what students are thinking and experiencing that I have decided to take two Thursday's a month to feature at these works of art. I hope you enjoy today’s student created podcast!

Kiana: Hi my name is Kiana Walsh and I'm a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln majoring in Hospitality Restaurant and Tourism Management. Today my podcast is going to be about how to market events on social media platforms specifically directed towards age groups and algorithms. Knowing your target audience is vital to marketing for an event. Knowing the age groups, who you're trying to get to come, and how to market it is all due specifically on who you want to have showing up . Each social media platform has a very different age bracket that there demographic is. 

Starting off with Instagram, Instagram's age demographic is mostly college kids and the tail end of Millennials and younger generations such as higher end elementary school and middle school students. According to Instagram there are six key factors that influence the Instagram algorithm and feed post. One interest, two relationships, three timeliness, four frequency, five following, and six is usage. What this means pretty much is interaction. That is the key to getting your event out there on Instagram. Instagram not necessarily is going to make people come to this event but it's going to get the name out there. Instagram works with who is connected to who and that's what comes up on your timeline first. It's not going to be in reverse chronological order which means the newest contents coming first, it's going to be with who you're connecting with the most. The more people at DM are going to show up more, the more people you comment on their post, like their posts are going to constantly keep coming up on your timeline. So to get your event out there you need to establish a following. Whether that’s following people just to get the name out there, having personal connections to have other people get your post out there, that's how it's going to get publicized and that's how it's going to get the most likes in the most viewings. 

And also with Instagram the shorter the video content and the grass, the more people are going to pay attention to it. It's a younger audience so you have to remember that you have to grab them right away, you have to have your photos be the highest quality because it's a very big competition.

The next social media platform that I'm going to talk about is Facebook. Everyone these days has a Facebook but not necessarily does everyone go on Facebook everyday. Facebook's age demographic is mostly towards older generations that are on it constantly, constantly checking up on it. While it's the higher tail half of gen Z and up and it's really focused on the millennial generation. The Facebook algorithm controls the ordering and presentation of posts so users see what is most relevant to them. When you're posting and marketing on Facebook you want to display a message that you want everyone to see. This can be through videos, through photos, but word content is going to do the best when it comes to Facebook and sharing wise. Creating an event on Facebook and marketing it on Facebook is more inviting people than getting the name out there. When it comes to Facebook data, it helps to recommend events users based on the number of factors. It's important that event organizers put the correct information about where their event is being held, when it’s starting, so the algorithm can promote the event. 

Facebook is a very great source to connect with people for events because you can create event page and that can be shared and multiplied. Facebook also allows you to cross promote with event co-hosts, meaning that you can change your events page host to someone else and that they're following and who they've gathered up in their network is going to see what's going to be posted on this events page creating a more buzz about the event leading into more people signing up and coming. 

LinkedIn is quite a tricky one when it comes to marketing for an event, specifically because LinkedIn is a more business professional multimedia source and it's aimed towards college kids and adults and people and professional sales and marketing or people are out of a job so it's hard to spread an event through Linkedin. And LinkedIn’s algorithm means that if people like it will continue to spread through likes and reviving likes until you go through a long period of time without getting a like. Meaning the more likes it gets the more is going to keep popping up and keep showing. It's not in a chronological order, it's not by who you're interacting with, it’s  specifically based on likes and not is the attraction. 

The best way to get a buzz going on LinkedIn is through direct messaging and as corny and cheesy as it sounds people actually do look at those messages and will then view your profile, view the company page, view the event page trying to figure out why this direct message came. LinkedIn ads are also very big one to promote events. If you know who you're trying to have at your LinkedIn would be beneficial because you can have sponsored posts which allow you to place them across to anyone with a particular job title, location, or job industry. To do this you text ads or sponsored content. This appears in the homepage feed of the target audience, both mobile and desktop. 

When it comes to the media platform of Twitter, this age group is between Generation Z Millennials and adults. So many adults use Twitter like young kids use Instagram, and the algorithm is reverse chronological order, once again meaning that that the content that's most recent is going to show up. To market an event on Twitter, create a compelling hashtag that people are going to want to interact with, make it relevant, make it witty to get the word out there. And you need to get everyone involved with it, including everyone at the event. From: vendors, speakers, sponsors, event staff, get them all involved with this hashtag on Twitter because the more the hashtag is used  the more it's going to come up as going viral. Another way to promote an event and market it on Twitter would really be to have a gimmick. And I know that sounds cheesy and tacky but that's what viewers are going to gravitate towards, and they're going to retweet it and share their opinions about it and the main reason for Twitter is a lot like Instagram, you’re not going to have direct invitations for this event but you're going to get the word out there on the event. And having a gimmick does that because then other people are going to share their opinions and more people are going to see it and they’ll develop their own opinions on it.  

Ads don't do well on Twitter, on Twitter I would recommend being human. Live-tweeting and making personal connections is how Twitter works. It's more of an emotional base content for audiences rather than ads this way, ads that way, sponsorship this way, why you need to come here in this event, what you're going to do at this event, no you need to make it personal and you need to make it connect and resign with people. I hope this brief podcast was helpful and thank you so much! 

Dr. K: What fantastic insight into social media marketing for your events with Kiana Walsh today! I have just such a love for social media marketing because here’s this established platform that's already reaching millions and millions, billions of people and all we have to do is put our event out there and try to play to the algorithms effectively. It is important to note that it seems every year or two years these different social media companies are adjusting their algorithms. For example a couple years ago on Facebook they used to categorize your post  whether you were text or picture or videos. And now they categorize the people whether you are a person who interacts with pictures, a person that interacts with videos, a person that interacts with text. And so some of the strategies for social media marketing change and as always because we're event professionals we have to make sure that we're staying up to date with these changes especially the algorithms. The differences between a boosted post vs a sponsored post, what the differences between the platforms are and their target markets and whether to use more add style writing or human storytelling style writing all of these things are things that should be considered. As always so much for taking the time to make the time! I hope that you enjoyed today student create a podcast as much as I did! I will talk with you soon!