MMC6730: Content Post Week 12
This week our assignment requires us to explain how we would utilize social media platforms and tools to promote an event.
Our plan needs to include a pre-event promotion, day-of-event promotion, and post-event promotion.
Lastly, we need to detail how we would use social media listening to measure the event’s success. For this assignment, I have chosen to promote a concert event.
Pre-Event Promotion
- Countdown & Reveal.
To kick off my concert event promotion, I would organize an exciting online countdown and reveal. Studies have shown that this can be an excellent tactic to build pre-event interest and buzz.
I would secure an official website for the concert and create a countdown with a logo depicting a major band that harkens back to a classic concert from yore (Woodstock?)
I would then cross-promote the countdown landing page over Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok — ensuring the broadest possible potential reach to relevant youth and young adult audiences on social media. Recent surveys for social media use among teens and young adults reveal a preference for these platforms:
I also would not rely on organic push alone.
I would take a portion of our marketing budget and apply it to a significant paid ad campaign across at least Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok — driving people to our website landing page and offering them a newsletter sign up to keep up with countdown updates.
Upon hitting the countdown, I would reveal the full details of the upcoming concert, including some of the headlining acts — but not all of them!
Over the course of the next month, I would continue to drop reveals regarding concert headliners on the main website and cross-promote across all our social media channels.
This is partly to keep a steady drumbeat of social media conversation and engagement and around the social media promotion for our concert.
As has it been pointed elsewhere, it is important to keep marketing promotion alive through a steady drum beat of multiple releases, articles, events and social media that keep their brand in front of their target audience.
This drip-feed of reveals allows us to do that for our concert.
2. Early Bird Ticket Offers & Deadlines.
As soon as the countdown concludes, I would provide a limited window to purchase super early bird discounted tickets.
This offer would be purchasable off our main website and cross-promoted across all our social media channels.
In addition to bringing in a first wave of revenue for this concert, these early bird sales will help us collect data early on for marketing purposes, increase engagement and interest early and create a sense of urgency that could drive additional early ticket purchases.
3. Perform giveaways for those with FOMO
In addition to paid promotion, I would also attempt to leverage organic promotion.
I would do this by leveraging our social media channels to push out free ticket giveaways as part of a unique social media challenge that would have the potential to takeoff virally over social media.
Creating buzz among our relevant audiences and hopefully reaching people event outside our key demographics, as the challenge spreads online.
For example, say I was promoting a concert headlined by Fleetwood Mac. I would setup a social media challenge that would require participants to mimic a simple action, dance or stunt.
And, I would make sure to tie it all together with an appropriate hashtag.
Those user-generated challenge videos with the highest engagement in the way of likes and comments would be eligible for the free giveaways.
This would push content creators to get creative and hopefully provide some great cost-free promotion for our concert. Here is an example of what that could look like:
Day-of-Event Promotion:
3. BTS pictures & video.
To promote the concert on the event day proper, I would make extensive use of backstage photos and video for all our official social media channels. This is an especially long video but parts of this could make up part of our content drops throughout the concert day over social media:
Hashtags would include the name of our concert event and the associated band.
If we have executed our pre-promotion correctly, there would be intense excitement at the concert and around it — with hordes of concertgoers and fans resharing our content as we publish, expanding our Share of Social Voice on the concert day.
4. Audience Interaction
We also want to promote engagement with our official social media channels on the day of the event. To achieve this, we would offer up polls as each act performs onstage.
I would make extensive use of polls, inviting concertgoers and those watching around the world to guess what song the band onstage might play next.
And I would have our social media channels ask our audience directly what songs they want to hear before their favorite bands take the stage, guaranteeing a tsunami of replies and song requests.
Post Event Metrics Analysis
- Share of Social Voice.
To measure the success of our event over social media there are many metrics we could potentially track. However, the one I would be most interested in tracking would be Social Share of Voice.
This metric measures brand exposure based on social media conversation. It’s usually measured as a percentage of total mentions within an industry, a defined group of competitors, or a specific window of time.
Social share of voice can be tallied manually, but the process of collecting brand and competitor social mentions can be cumbersome.
The basic formula for calculating social share of voice
The basic formula is as follows:
Total industry mentions / our brand mentions *100 = social share of voice
Crucially, SoVS provides my team and I the ability to measure the overall effectiveness of our campaign.
If our share increases (compared to similar scale concerts and to events happening around the same time period) after running the campaign for the concert, then it shows that our social media campaign hit the right mark.
The promotion generated buzz among our target audience and possibly similar relevant audiences on social media.
If our SoVS decreases, it would indicate the failure of our social media campaign to generate conversation and engagement with our target audience and would signal the need to dramatically switch up our promotion strategy for the next concert.
