Social Media Tips for Webinar Promotion

So you've decided to run a webinar to promote your business offering - a product or a service. As someone who has been using social media to promote your business you might be wondering if there are any specific tips, do's and don'ts for webinar promotion and engagement. Social networking can certainly help you with promotion and delivery of a webinar. Read on to find out simple ways you can expand your reach and get more subscribers for the event.

When you are planning a webinar, you would be considering ways to drive registrations. You could use:

- your prospect list and your email list, especially if you are planning to sell something at the end of the webinar,
- your website by adding banners and signup forms on it,
- invitation from sales 1-on-1 conversions to target specific prospects you would like to attend,
- sponsorships by offering other companies to showcase their services or products in exchange of promoting your event as well,
- partner or guest speaker promotion by linking up with other industry experts to run a joint event,
- social media platforms: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+,
- social media advertising on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook,
- print media and advertising
- direct mail campaign.

The timing of your social media messages can be very important in determining the success of your event. Audiences can be targeted at different times, with different messages to coincide with your email campaigns. A message or means of communication may not work the same with all of your followers. Vary the times when you schedule your social media mix and analyse the effectiveness of your campaign.

Tip 1: create a campaign on social media to promote your future event and drive traffic to the registration page. You can share this campaign with other promoters or speakers so that more of you can be promoting the same event.

On registration and landing pages integrate social media to encourage registrants to promote your webinar through their social media channels.

Studies show that people are more likely to follow through a chain of action you asked them to complete, after completing the first one (register for the webinar). So you can ask them to tweet and share your webinar information as well as leave a Facebook comment on your webinar page which will be visible to not only future registrants but all friends of your participant.

Tip 2: ask participants to share your event with their friends through social media and leave you a comment that they are looking forward to taking part / introducing themselves.

Integrating social media, for example, embedding a Twitter feed into the webinar, will allow your audience to stay on your webinar but communicate with their social network.

Attendees will remain on the webinar but are able to tweet updates using a pre-selected hashtag (which also keeps attendees 'on topic'). This hashtag then serves to promote your webinar to a larger audience on Twitter.

You can also ask attendees to go to your Facebook page, share an pre-created update about your webinar and leave a comment - this could get them into a competition to win a free copy of your product.

Tip 3: use social media chat throughout your webinar to keep promoting it even while it's running.

Every piece of feedback, whether from the end-of-event survey ratings to the more uncensored social media commentary, can help you produce a better webinar in the future.

So search and review any comments that mention your webinar event title (including variations of the name), your hashtags, your social media IDs - make a list of helpful comments for improvement as well as compliments to your event you could use as testimonials.

When following up with your attendees, ask them to share on social media one (or several) key learning outcomes from your event, what they liked best of all, why someone like them should attend a similar event - again as well as promoting your webinar these can serve as real-life testimonials you can print-screen and use on future webinar registration pages.

Tip 4: use social media to gather feedback and testimonials after your event, as well as still promoting it to future participants.

In summary, integrating social media into webinars helps in many ways. It can:

- help drive registration to events,
- create a more engaging experience,
- extend the reach of your messages,
- provide direct feedback on content and presentation.

The impact of your events and the return on investment is greatly enhanced by using social media in the development of your webinars, whether they are marketing, training or internal productions.

Your action this week:

Have you taken part in a webinar that made great use of social media? Share your experiences in comments below.

And if you have any questions about using social media to promote an event or a webinar, ask away as well - I promote I will reply to each and every one of them!