Instagram is a powerful tool for creating a real buzz around your event. With a stunning feed and relevant content, you can build huge levels of engagement.
Enhancing your Instagram marketing and promotion takes a bit of effort and planning. Yet, the payoff from this can be an increased engagement from loyal followers/attendees and a greater outreach to potential followers/attendees of your event.
THE HASHTAG
With the all-important hashtag, consistency is crucial! If you are posting anything on Instagram connected to your event, be it a post to your feed or your stories, make sure you include your chosen hashtag. This keeps all your content in the same place and encourages users to share their content all in one easy to view location.
It has uses beyond directly featuring it on Instagram itself. Including it on all promotional materials, such as on your website, marketing emails, and print, provides a greater reach to a larger audience.
Another way to gain greater reach via Instagram hashtags is running and hashtag incentive. These incentives are a great way to encourage users to share your hashtag and your event. Your incentive can be anything from photo competitions to tagging friends and family alongside the hashtag for free tickets.
Hashtags offer several benefits for event promotion and increase your reach and engagement concisely and effectively!
USER-GENERATED CONTENT IS KEY
User-generated content is any content created by your users, in this case, the attendees of your event. It has become increasingly popular with many large brands and events featuring carefully created content. It has become frequently popular and effective with Instagram users.
Its popularity with users is usually down to the authenticity of the content. The content builds trust with the users because they have created it. This content is organic and will carry an accurate representation of your event.
It also offers you a greater library of content to choose from. Having a good mix of this user-generated content and branded content works well in creating a diverse range of content on your feed, which again drives that all-important engagement.
If all this wasn’t enough to encourage user-generated content on Instagram for events, here is how it affects your users and audience as a whole. It builds a real connection and relationship with your audience. Sharing their posts of the event and their experience makes them feel appreciated. It grows users’ loyalty as it shows your appreciation as an organiser for their attendance. Don’t forget to tag and mention them in the caption!
UPDATE YOUR BRANDING AND PROFILE
Updating your branding and profile to promote your event helps bring an added feel of legitimacy to your event. That it is as important as the brand itself. Adding your hashtag to your profile picture alongside your logo or creating a custom logo puts your event at the forefront of your image. It will be one of the first thing users see so is an effective way of subtly promoting your event. Just make sure you keep this consistent across all social media channels!
Keep your bio short and sweet but with the added extras of a link to your event and your hashtag. Again, not the obvious way of promoting your event, yet it is one of the first things users will see when visiting your profile. Keeping the link in the bio keeps it quick and easy to find when promoting your event in your feed or stories. Add in a simple call to action “Link in the bio” in posts to drive traffic to your profile and event page.
These are just a few of the basics of promoting your event using Instagram. It is a powerful tool when utilised and offers a huge reach to potential ticket buyers with not too much effort. Next time find out how to utilise Instagram Stories to your advantage, how geotags can help you reach a larger local audience, and how to build event hype with influencers!
