How to Use Twitter to Promote Your Event [Q&A]

Social Media Explorer manages a community of marketers on its Facebook Group, . We often get questions on the site that are relevant to our entire audience, so I thought I’d post this question from one of our Group members, Paul, who is looking for suggestions on how to use Twitter to promote an event.

We welcome everyone to join our and pose any marketing questions you may have. We’ll do our best to provide you the most practical and actionable answers possible!

My team is in the process of planning our first social media campaign to promote a conference on Twitter. How much lead time is recommended to start promoting our sessions and how many times per day should we post?

Thanks for your questions, Paul. Although there is no hard and fast rule about the lead time to start promoting your conference on Twitter, due to the overall dwindling attention spans on social these days, we’d recommend that you start promoting your event no more than about 4-6 weeks before the event start-date.

It’s also a good idea to come up with a number of iterations for the copy you intend to post on Twitter. For example, you might consider a humorous take for one tweet, while another offers an early incentive to register. We also recommend that for one set of iterations, you use high-quality, custom images, combined with text relevant to the event.

For example, here are a couple of image-based tweets from our friends and partners at the #DMWF Conference. The first focuses on an early registration discount code, and the second highlights one of the speakers at the event:

We're coming back to New York! #DMWF Conference & Expo North America arrives 7-8 Nov. Register by 9/8 to save $300. https://t.co/Xa4S50ooOo pic.twitter.com/0Ly31oHmyU

— #DMWF (@DigiMarketingWF) July 4, 2017

Speaker spotlight: #DMWF is delighted to be joined by Melissa Davis (@melissamia) this November! #DMWF https://t.co/CwjfXVwadS pic.twitter.com/1Fk2176rTl

— #DMWF (@DigiMarketingWF) August 24, 2017

How Many Times Should You Tweet About Your Event?

Assuming you have a variety of text and image-based tweets designed and ready to go, and assuming you are posting at least a few times a day with other, non-promotional tweets, you can post as many as 2 or 3 times a day, as long as those tweets are spaced out and coincide with when your audience is online and paying attention.

A Couple of Great Tools to Help You

To help prepare your image-based tweets, you can use a great, easy to use tool called Snappa. It allows you to drag and drop images and text together into templates that can then be easily shared to Twitter. Free and paid versions are available.

To schedule your tweets in advance and to find out the optimum times that your audience is on Twitter and interacting, Sprout Social is a great platform to handle both of these tasks.

So, if you’re planning to use Twitter to promote your event, I hope the suggestions, above, provide you some tips and tools to help make your event a success!

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