 Thanks Susan for the introduction and so thank you everybody for joining us today. I'm Molly and I have I'm the social media manager at TechSoup and I have a lot of experience planning events and optimizing them for social because it's one of the best ways that you can promote your event and really get the word out there about getting attendees to join and then during the event. So I have a presentation I've prepared for you and please feel free to ask questions and I will get to them at the end and I'm really excited to answer the questions so please ask away and think about how you know what type of event you're hosting and how this can apply to you and I will also try to we will be following up with a checklist so go back to the course and a later on and check back and we will have a checklist that you can go through so if you are taking notes today just remember that we will also have a checklist that you can go back to at the end so let's get started I'm going to share my screen with you now. So how to make your event a social success so we're going to talk about planning the promotions how to create buzz what to do during your event and also what to do after event. So if you missed the last TS30 it was about how to plan your event so thinking about what type of event you're going to host more of like the logistics of setting all of that up so if you did miss that course and you don't know what kind of event you're having yet I encourage you to go back and check that out first because you need to have selected the type of event that you're hosting what speakers are going to be presenting if you have speakers if it's that type of event what partners you're going to have involved the location time and date and once you have those sorted out this is when you can really start thinking about the social social logistics for your event. So let's get started so your social profiles are the first thing that you're going to identify so you're going to ask these questions does the events the speaker of the event have a Facebook page or Twitter handle does the organization you're partnering with have social platforms you should tag does the event have a sponsor you must tag on social so collect all of these and put this in your planning document next pick a hashtag so this is a very important part of the event your hashtag needs to be one hashtag unless it's a huge conference then you might have additional hashtags but your hashtag is really going to represent the entire event and be the one thing that everybody is looking for in terms of engagement for the event so you really need to think about what is going to work across all platforms so Facebook Twitter Instagram LinkedIn and Google Plus all support hashtags in it in the next to an extent LinkedIn's a little bit funky but they do you can search and so you need to think what you what is going to be good across all of these so here's some tips keep it short relevant and memorable so a long hashtag is never advisable because no one's going to be able to remember it and it's going to be hard to promote and it's also going to be hard to tweet and also search the hashtag and make sure it is not overused so go on all of those platforms I listed above and see if you know if there's thousands or hundreds of thousands you're going to evaluate based on the the least amount of hashtags used so if it's a really popular hashtag don't use it if the event is recurring keep it consistent and unique so if you have an event every month use the same hashtag every month if the event is yearly add the year so some examples is for our global summit our global tech soup gathering where we bring all our partners together we used TSGN summit it was a little bit long but summit is you know a lot of people use this at the end so it is a good way to use it and it was really memorable and for the online community managers happy hour or I'm sorry online community managers meet up and sometimes happy hours that we do this is OC tribe and it's used monthly so it's it's pretty memorable and it's it's very used and then and 10 hosts a conference and they do 17 NTC and this is pause real quick we're getting messages that people can't hear so no sound but some people can hear so I would say just double check your mic I make that all right keep on going hopefully you all can hear me still and sorry if you're having we're having some technical difficulties here so back to the hashtags so the 17 NTC so they put the year in front you can put it in front or after your abbreviation for the hashtag and each year you would change that out so if it's yearly event you would change it each year to the year so here's some examples of our use of the TSGN summit hashtag for our event you can see here that you know everybody was using it at the event so this was considered you know pretty pretty exciting and you want to encourage throughout the event people use it so just think of a very memorable hashtag so the next thing you're gonna ask yourself is are you gonna be live streaming the event so will you be streaming the event on YouTube live Facebook live Twitter Periscope Instagram Google Hangout or other there is a lot of options so just determine this it's not you know it's optional you don't have to do this for your event but it is it is something you can do so I advise that you use Facebook live it it is one of the easiest platforms to go live and it really helps boost your audience Instagram's also really easy but Facebook live has a great way to archive the video so that's why I'm suggesting it and then I also suggest that you stay tuned and join our Facebook live event for our next TS 30 will a few upcoming it's not the next one but it will be coming so if you are trying to get into how to how to do the live stream join us there and here's an example of that same same TechSoup Global Summit we did a bunch of Facebook lives at this this was a big event so it was more than one Facebook live but they did do pretty well we got you know 1.6 K views on one of our our Facebook lives and we were able to create a playlist so if you're gonna have multiple lives from the event you'll be able to create a playlist on Facebook so that's kind of fun so join us for our upcoming stay tuned for that one TS 30 so next you're gonna talk about establish a ticketing platform and event promotion sites so this means are you gonna use a ticket site are you gonna try to get RSVPs or get tickets in charge and I recommend using Eventbrite or Universe there's a bunch other there others out there but Eventbrite is great because it really has an audience already on there so it also helps promote your event to their audience and I also suggest using meetup maybe to get RSVPs but you can also use Eventbrite and meetup and meetup can just be a way to really increase promotions and you can send people back to your ticketing website you can also create a Facebook event page and this will be another additional promotion and you're gonna link in your ticket site there's also Airbnb social impact experiences this is something new that Airbnb is doing and it allows you to host an event with them and fundraise for your cause no cost to you and you get to keep the fund raising but it it promotes it to the Airbnb anybody visiting the location so if somebody's coming to San Francisco they will be promoting to this audience the experiences and so check it out there we have the link and then there's also another option is to reach out to local event listing sites so for San Francisco some that I have in mind you're like fun cheap SF if it's a free ish event other ones would be like your local newspaper sites your local blogging sites kind of just do a search on where people are listing calendars for events and think of creative ways that you can just ask to be promoted on there so another tip is that if you're live streaming create a virtual ticket and send out the link before going live so I have an example here if you're using a vent right and you can say watch it online and you can have people register for this and they're gonna provide their email and then right before you can send them the link so it's a great way to actually lead generation and to get more people to attend your event even if you you sell out of your seats so also visual content is very important so think about how you're going to create a social graphic what kind of graphics you're gonna create are you gonna have one that all the partners are gonna use or are you gonna have multiples are you gonna create a promotional video or gift a tip you don't need to have design experience of course you can use Adobe creative cloud with Photoshop or Illustrator but you can also just use Adobe Spark or Canva which are free platforms and you can make these amazing graphics and you can also make a gift on Giffy or use existing gifts so just think about that and have a plan so next social promotions so let's talk about how you're gonna really start promoting this thing so first you're gonna start selling tickets or RSPs online at least one month prior to your event that's what I suggest the earlier is better when you start setting up your page but you're not really gonna do heavy promotions months in advance you're just going to set up the page and kind of have your have those promotion sites kind of starting to promote for you then you're gonna create sample tweets and posts with visuals the visuals that you already created and send this to your presenters your partners your team and any attendees that are interested in promoting and you're gonna add and you're gonna tag and use the hashtag so on the right hand side here you can see this was for a Twitter chat that we had we curated a bunch of sample tweets and and posts that we sent to all of the partners involved so that we had a cohesive message about how to attend this event and how to get involved and it really created a lot of buzz next you're going to add event promotions to your social calendar so schedule out for you know that month before you're gonna post twice a week or you're gonna post three times a week and then leading up to the event one week before that's really when you go heavy with the promotions and you promote about four times a week or really depending on how much other content you don't want to flood people on your feet you need to make sure that it also fits with your posting schedule so keep that in mind I think people would get annoyed if it's the only thing you're talking about so make sure it fits into your whole social calendar so also create social ads on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram this is if you have a budget for it it's not necessary but it is really helpful we do sometimes do this and you can see on the right hand side here if you create a Facebook page you can actually boost that page so you can send a promotion of the event you know directly in the newsfeed of for Facebook so people can you can basically try to optimize for people to say that they're interested or going to attend and that that could be the optimization of your ad and so Facebook has a lot of resources on how you can do that so if you are interested go check that out and I do encourage it but it's not necessary if you're really big with the other social promotion sites you will definitely get people to find you that way and even just on a Facebook page people are searching on there people are searching events on Facebook and they can still find you and then also post the event to relevant groups on Facebook or LinkedIn so this is kind of a pro tip but if you know any Facebook group that is relevant to your topic post the event on there and let people know about it if there is a LinkedIn group you know women in tech LinkedIn group or something relevant to your topic go ahead and post that event in there as well so next let's talk about creating buzz so we've kind of understand our promotion schedule and how we're going to do that how can we create even more buzz so share relevant content on the topic for a few months before so if you have this way in advance start generating content and sharing that to your social handles so if the topic is about social media a few months before we're gonna or that month before at least you're going to start sharing content and using hashtags relating to social media also search Twitter users on LinkedIn and LinkedIn or search Twitter users or LinkedIn members sorry by the hashtags and location and invite them this kind of an aggressive push but you can actually go and start looking at people who might be interested especially if it's a local event you can get pretty curated there you can also invite people to the Facebook page so encourage your staff and team to do that as well and also you can do that in email promotions create a contest this is if you really want to create a lot of buzz you can create a contest and give away a ticket and another thing is to create a blog post written by the event presenter or on the topic so if one of your presenters wants to do a blog post and talk about the topic and then kind of tease in like learn more at our upcoming event that's a great way or you can write about the topic and link to the event another thing is to send an email obviously inviting your members and with the hashtag don't forget the hashtag it has to go in all of your promotions but basically you can send a mass email and tell people to do that as well so next during the event you want to continue the buzz so it does not stop once you've promoted it and you've gotten all your attendees and people of RSVP'd you really want to continue this buzz so this is where mostly a lot of people use Facebook and Twitter but also Instagram is really big now but live tweeting is a very great way to continue buzz during the event so I highly recommend that you encourage live tweeting so encourage social during the event so you can print out hashtags print out the hashtag and put signs up so on the top right hand corner here you see South by Southwest I love this sign because it they have two different hashtags that there they put these signs all over before you go into the conference room and do something like this you can print out kind of whatever you want make a social graphic in cam though or Joby spark and just encourage people to tweet throughout the event with the bright hashtag because people always forget what hashtag it is unless you're constantly reminding them and then display a live Twitter feed on a TV projector or an iPad with the hashtag so this is going to be you can see here is like a live feed so you can see everybody using it during the event so you won't really want to encourage this so if it's next to the presenter everybody can kind of see what they're quoting and it really encourages people to also participate because they see it right in front of them they want to be part of the conversation they want to capture what the presenter is saying or what's being done during the event so this can be with an additional projector like I said I've also have a bunch of links that we're sending out of free ways you can do this who feed is one that is kind of just uses Twitter but it works really well and this I can't say it enough it really does encourage people to use the hashtag if you don't have an extra TV or printer you can even use a computer and iPad but just make sure it's visible otherwise people will forget about it and then of course ask the audience to tweet throughout and have presenters add their user names to their presentation this is super important one time there was an example where everybody was during one of our events everybody because the presenter didn't put their Twitter everybody unfortunately was using the wrong Twitter and they were tagging the wrong person but really the presenter didn't have a Twitter so make sure that's known so that people don't try to go find a user on Twitter's assuming it's the person because they've the same first and last name it kind of looks like the person because then all of your engagement for that event is kind of ruined because it's not properly tagging the right or attributing right people so always refer back to that beginning step of identifying those user names and make sure that's all promoted as well so there you have the free hashtag feeds and you can do different things like if you're trying to encourage more Instagram use or picture use you know you can really promote that throughout the event you can have a wall and then have a hashtag and say take a picture here with the hashtag and so there's different ways to encourage depending on which which platform you want to increase visibility on but I typically find for presentations that Twitter is live tweeting is the best way for presentations but if it's a more social fun event it might be Instagram or Facebook and so after the events this is post event I still have some work to do to see if your event was a success so track social success and engagement from the event so to do this you can track the hashtag you can track your specific posts but the hashtag is a great way to see your overall engagement so I have a few tools that you can use but you can always do this manually you can go onto Twitter search the hashtag go to Facebook search the house tag each one and try to capture how how how many people were using it how many times it was used what was the highest amount of likes or retweets or shares and kind of capture that into like a one-page or so you can say you know this time we got this many likes or tweets or engagements but next time we want to get this many and you can really evaluate if it was a success on social or not and then you can also kind of say why wasn't it so also create a moment on Twitter or a store five so I'm stored by is to capture more than just Twitter but Twitter has this great feature where you can actually go back and capture all the tweets from a specific hashtag and add them to a story so you can basically bring together all the different engagements and have one place that everybody can go back in and kind of see that story so if they weren't a part of it or if you want to you know capture this in a better way moments are a really great way to do that and then it pops up into your feet and reminds everybody and then this is also a great way to pull all the attendees into a Twitter list so you can take all of those attendees that were tweeting during the event and you can add them to a Twitter list and you can make that public or you can make that private but this is a great way to continue to engage these people so that they go to your events again and then follow up with a thank you email to the attendees and ask them to follow you on social for more events don't be afraid to ask them to follow you on social if they weren't already and send them that moment on Twitter and send them also the live recording or the actual recorded video depending on if you're recording the event if you do make sure you send them that link and also post it to YouTube and then also go back and post that recorded video or live video that ends up becoming recorded post that back on your Facebook page or your meetup page or your ticketing page so just make sure you continue that conversation and buzz and that people can go back and review the presentation as well if it was an event with presentation so I think we still have a little bit of time for questions so I want to thank you so much for listening to me but please let me know if you have any questions also don't hesitate to reach out happy to follow you with the TechSoup account and get connected on social so please tweet or message us and let me know that you followed our presentation and you want us to follow you on social and I will definitely make sure that happens so let me know if you have any questions thank you sometimes the audio we're sitting in the same room so we've been in our audio between talking so we apologize for that we do have some questions about like how do you really measure some things the social success how you know what would be an indicator you talked about the measurements in terms of statistics but what are some other indicators that your social event has been a success yeah definitely so I think that it can be you know it really depends on the size of attendees so if you have let's say only 30 people who attend your event and you know maybe like half of them tweeted or posted about it or liked you on social or started following you like that would be a success I think that's a pretty large portion it really also depends on what type of audience so I often times how you know we do a lot of events where people are really social I'm so you know maybe everybody is almost tweeting but you won't always get everybody so really just depends on the size of your audience and how much engagement you've got you can always track you know how people found your event was it through social media but for me I personally love to see people engaging on social events and for me that is the biggest success you know you have all these promotions that help get people to your event and there's a lot of different tactics you can get people to your event through email marketing and other ways and other types of promotions so when you see people engaged and wanting to share that to me is a social success so even if you get you know a few people really excited to do that to me that would be a social success and you can always say okay these people really excited why were they so excited and how can I get more people in the future to be be that excited so you can really learn from that one other question you know you talk a lot about success and measuring success this is easy for me to say statistically and using all these tools or just tracking it yourself but you know sometimes we we have events that aren't so successful can you talk about a time where this might have happened to you and what sort of lessons did you take away from that so not every event is successful and a lot of times you just really need to try and it really depends on what type of event so I've hosted a lot of events and I used to host when I was managing a co-working space I was hosting so many events and it was you know sometimes like just the day is off like you do on a Thursday and it's it's not that exciting of a topic and if we're talking about you know presentation learning style workshop or something like that and you just don't get the engagement RSVPs you want or sometimes you get tons of RSVPs but you don't get enough people actually coming and I think that each time you just need to to document it so you need to take notes and and make sure you go back and say okay why wasn't this was the topic not that exciting was the time not that exciting did we not promote enough in advance did our partners not promote it enough because that can be huge is having your partners really engaged with you on social as well and then did we not encourage it enough so you just go back through that checklist and make sure you you did all of those things and if you didn't do one enough maybe that's why it wasn't a success but also keep in mind that sometimes events just there there's almost no real explanation why they were in a success like you have to kind of see the time of day and there's a lot of different factors that play into it so if you had a lot of RSVPs and not a lot of people show up it can happen so just learn from your bike by doing learn by doing that's that's how I think most of us are able to to do that great thank you Molly we are actually about one minute before time so I did want to remind everyone that we do record all of these events they are posted in the course just by month and day so you can simply go back through the course navigate through the different modules we do curate them by month so at the end of July I'll have one module that will say July 2017 when you click on the module you can see all the different topics that we've covered you can view the recording again you can look at all the resources and of course you can provide us with the survey your feedback on that particular event so you can always go back and view anything that we've conducted in the past I would like to ask everyone to take that minute to right now you're in the live event if you go to the module for today which is July 18th how to make your event a social success there is a survey right in the middle if you take a moment I can actually show it to you so you'd be able to take the survey to give us your feedback so when you go to how to make your event a social success maximize my screen I will be posting the recording right here and here's the survey and all of the links that we tried to share out today like I said I will try to clean those up for everyone so you can review those share those or do whatever you need with Molly's experience and expertise and I will also share the Prezi as well once we have that I'll okay so let me go back and see if there are any other questions I don't see any other questions okay all right well Molly if you'd like to say goodbye thank you so much and please connect with us on social and we hope to see you next week on our event that we'll talk to you about webinars how to create and deliver a successful webinar thanks so much everyone have a great rest of your day all