Need some help getting started with social media? Or perhaps your non-profit has been using social media for so long that you’re struggling to come up with new ideas?

We’ve compiled a list of 50 ways your non-profit can use social media for your next event. Take a look through the list and let us know what you would add.

1. Create a LinkedIn or Facebook group

Give your attendees a place to congregate online. With a dedicated place to discuss your cause, your event and related topics, your audience will have more reason to revisit your page and share it with friends.

2. Create a Facebook event

A Facebook Event provides an easy way for your audience to discuss your event with others and share it with their friends. By bringing your event to their natural sharing environment, you will make this process easier, and thus increase your audience.

3. Create a Twitter list

Create a Twitter list of your guest speakers or high-profile attendees. This will make it easy for you and the rest of your audience to follow updates before and during your event.

4. Create a Twitter hashtag

To help other users follow discussions about your event, create an official Twitter hashtag and promote its use early.

5. Add your event to Upcoming

Upcoming is an events guide that allows users to search events by category and find popular local events to attend.

6. Add your event to Lanyrd

If you are holding a conference, add your event to online conference directory, Lanyrd. Before, during and after your event, Lanyrd is a useful tool to bring attendees together and help them get the most out of your conference.

7. Test your ideas

Using your social media community as a collective sounding board, you can get early feedback on ideas for your event, including locations, themes, guest speakers and fundraising ideas.

8. Find the info you need

Put your social media community to work by tapping into this collective knowledge-base when you’re looking for information. The great thing about social media is it makes sharing so easy, so even if no-one in your immediate circle can help, they can surely pass along your request to people they know.

9. Find people to help

Your extended network online can be helpful if you are looking for people to help plan your event. Whether you’re after specific skills and experience or just general volunteers, reaching out through social networks will give you a multiplied word-of-mouth approach.

10. Ask for advice when problem-solving

If you have cultivated a community of people who work in similar fields to you, this will be a good resource for help with solving problems. No doubt many people you know will have come across the same issues before, and have some helpful ideas about how to get around them.

11. Notify attendees of last-minute changes

When you come across the inevitable curve-balls that force you to change your event plans at the last minute, social networks like Twitter and Facebook will be handy resources to help you notify attendees.

12. Provide tips about getting there

If your event attracts attendees from far-and-wide, they will surely appreciate any extra effort to make their experience as smooth as possible. Providing maps, directions and tips about getting to the event will help you as well, by making it less likely that you will have people coming in late or getting lost.

13. Get inspiration and ideas

Browsing blogs, forums, networking groups and social networks is an easy way to get inspiration for your next event. Pinterest is a popular visual bookmarking network that is useful for design and decorative inspiration.

14. Prepare your audience

A quick update on Twitter or Facebook is useful for preparing your attendees for last minute weather changes. If they need to slip, slop, slap or bring an umbrella just in case, this is a good way of getting the information out there quickly.

15. Integrate your traditional and social media marketing

Integrate your traditional marketing materials with your social media profiles by adding your website URL, Facebook Page URL or Twitter handle. Using a QR code, you can also link directly to one these links for anyone who scans the code.

Image credit: QReate & Track

16. Find your target market

Use social media tools like Twitter search, Facebook and LinkedIn groups, Socialmention and blogging communities to find out where your target market spends their time online.

17. Share the planning process

As you plan and organise your event during the lead-up, give your social media community insight by sharing images, videos and blog posts with updates on the process. Giving your audience an idea of what you’re working on will whet their appetite as they anticipate the event.

18. Monitor mentions of your organisation or event

Set up Google Alerts for free using your organisation’s name and the name of your event. You can also use these alerts to monitor related keywords.

19. Find opportunities to connect

Connect with bloggers in your field to find opportunities to share your content, and guest-bloggers to feature on your own blog. You may also find community blogs related to your organisation where you can post content on a regular basis.

20. Join in conversations

Join in online conversations to offer your insights from within the organisation and add context to the discussion. You may be surprised to learn what people are saying about your event, and how you can help.

21. Generate new discussions

Ask questions and target users interested in your field to generate conversations online. Focus on topics about your field in general, to include as many people as you can.

22. Respond to questions & concerns

Setting up a hashtag for anyone with questions is an easy way to keep on top of these. Using your hashtag, you could also organise a regular time to be online and respond to user questions and concerns in real-time.

23. Find negative sentiment & turn it around

Keeping on top of the conversations about your event will give you the best chance for responding to negative comments quickly. Do what you can to turn negative feedback around by fixing the problem, apologizing, and keeping the conversation public so others in your community can see your proactive efforts.

24. Highlight positive feedback

Highlighting positive audience responses in the lead-up to your event will give you leverage to sell more tickets. You may want to use this feedback during your event to highlight your active community members and thank them for their contributions.

25. Encourage user-generated content

Using networks like Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr or Facebook, attendees can upload photos and videos taken during your event and tag your accounts. This will give you an opportunity to share user-generated content with your wider community online.

26. Bring people together to form a community

Use your influence on social networks to connect people who are interested in your cause. Bringing them together will not only further develop their engagement with your organisation, but help to create new relationships within your wider network.

27. Keep attendees updated

As you add new features, guest speakers or highlights to your event line-up, use social media to keep your audience updated. If you announce key news on your blog on a regular basis, this will ensure those who are looking forward to attending or considering purchasing tickets will continue to come back for updates.

28. Engage your audience with games

Twitter hashtag games are a fun and popular way to engage with your online audience. Using a short, snappy hashtag and a theme that’s related to your event or your organisation’s general field, create a game based around silly puns, creative wordplay or fun trivia questions.

29. Set up promotions and giveaways

Set up a giveaway or a competition on Facebook, Twitter or your blog. To encourage engagement, ask your follows to retweet something or share it on Facebook for a chance to win.

30. Share memorable quotes

As your event takes place, collect the best quotes used by guest speakers, members of your organisation or attendees. Share these with your followers online, or hang on to them to enhance your follow-up blog post or video.

31. Run a live blog

Using a platform like Cover It Live, set-up a live blog on your website to keep your online audience involved as your event unfolds. Add information like memorable quotes, audience reactions and topics covered.

32. Live stream your event

If your event is highly visual, set up an account with Ustream or LiveStream to run a live video stream for your audience at home. These sites also let you save the video to watch again later.

33. Engage with audience members who can’t attend

If you are using a Twitter hashtag, Facebook page or LinkedIn group to collate conversations and engagement, keep monitoring this during your event to engage with those who can’t attend. Answering questions, providing updates and posting highlights as the event takes place will keep these people involved.

34. Find relevant content to share

Pinterest and Flickr are perfect for finding photos of related events and causes. YouTube and Vimeo both highlight popular video content, and Google Alerts or Google Reader will help you stay on top of news and relevant blog posts.

35. Highlight leaders in your field

When you find other users online who are providing relevant content to your audience, give them a shout out and say thanks. This will add to your network, as well as peripherally promoting your organisation and event.

36. Get ideas for new content

Collecting and sharing great content you find online is a perfect way to inspire new ideas about content you can create to promote your event. Take note of the content that works best with your audience.

37. Find out what others are doing

Track your competitors to see what strategies are working for them, and how they are building their audience online. Although not every strategy they use will work for you, it will give you ideas about new ways of developing content and increasing your network.

38. Start a blog

A blog is a dedicated environment for you to communicate with your audience. This space can be used to update attendees on the progress of your event planning, sharing highlights from previous events held by your organisation and sharing the motivation behind the creation of the event.

39. Create a photo blog

For the more visually-geared events, a photo blog might be a better option. Using images allows your audience members to quickly get a feel for your organisation and your cause.

40. Create slide presentations

Using a service like SlideShare, you can create a slide presentation to use during your event, which can also be shared online before and after the event. Not only is this an easy way for attendees to revisit topics covered in your event, but it allows other users to share and view your presentation online as well.

41. Record and share videos

Use a video-sharing site like YouTube or Vimeo to upload and share videos of your event. Edit clips together to create a highlights reel that runs for more than a minute for the best traction.

42. Share audio files

Record interviews or speeches and share the audio files with a service like Soundcloud or Broadcastr, which lets you tag audio uploads with your location.

42. Record podcasts

Interview regular donors, celebrity attendees, speakers and people within your organisation to create a series of podcasts leading up to your event. Provide interesting teasers about what the event will involve as well as interesting discussions on related topics of interest.

43. Create a photo album

Create a photo album on Facebook, Google+ or Flickr to collect images of guest speakers, celebrities, attendees and representatives from your organisation during the event, as well as some ‘behind-the-scenes’ photos as you get set-up.

44. Send email newsletters

Send regular updates to your email subscribers including news about your organisation and its activities, as well as reminders about your event. Add some dynamic content to your newsletter to spice things up, as well – photos, videos and links to relevant content online will make for a more engaging read.

45. Create a QR code

Use a service like Kaywa or QR Codes Australia to create a QR code linking to your event website or tickets page. Print this onto your traditional marketing materials as well as using it on your website.

46. Check-in with geolocation

Use a service like Foursquare or Facebook Places to check-in to your event and encourage attendees to do the same. Offer a reward for checking-in, or leave tips about the venue or the surrounding area.

47. Follow-up

Reach out through your social networks and email list to follow-up with attendees after your event. Catch up on any questions or concerns you haven’t responded to yet, and provide some feedback about the success of the event and whether you met your fundraising or awareness goals.

48. Re-live the event

Use Storify to create a timeline of all the online content surrounding your event. Pull in related tweets, Facebook updates, photos and videos to create a dynamic overview of your event as it unfolded.

49. Thank attendees

Send personal thanks to those attendees who participated in your event through social media by providing feedback or spreading the word. If you are short on time, a general thank you will remind your audience that you appreciate their efforts.

50. Get feedback

Use an online survey or poll, or simply ask your online audience to share their feedback after your event. If you use a Twitter hashtag or Facebook group, this will help you collect feedback into one space.

Got something to add? Leave a comment below and let us know how your non-profit uses social media for events. Can we get the list up to 100 ideas?

As more and more of our lives become dependent on technology, we are seeing more innovative ways of completing everyday tasks. Sharing contact information at an event is one of these tasks which is still in the process of become digitalised. For those looking for a solution to carrying paper business cards, here are three tools that make it easy to share your contact information digitally.

Cardcloud

Available for Android and iOS, Cardcloud is a mobile app that enables users to quickly and easily share contact details with others. The app offers phone-to-phone sharing, but for recipients who don’t have the app installed, the phone-to-email option keeps them from missing out.

The app also collects extra data to make sharing more useful: it remembers details like your location, and the time and date you shared or received contact information. For a large event when a lot of people are exchanging information, or for regular event attendees, this extra data could make remembering new contacts much easier.

After a quick sign-up process using your Facebook or LinkedIn account, you can create as many different digital business cards as you like, including as much of your contact information as necessary. You can also add your social media account details to help new contacts find you across the web.

Bump

Taking a more physical approach to the concept of sharing digital contact details is Bump, a mobile app that also works on both iOS and Android.

For an overview of how the service works, watch the video below.

With Bump, your digital business card is exchanged with other users by physically bumping your phones together. Although this process does not require the same operating system, other users must have the app installed to participate. Unlike Cardcloud’s phone-to-email option, Bump excludes many users by limiting the devices for which the app is available, and requiring both parties to download the app to begin with.

If you do find other Bump users, however, it can be more useful than just exchanging contact information. Bump allows users to share photos, music, apps and calendar details. You can even connect on social networks by bumping your phones together.

Jumpscan

Jumpscan is more limited in terms of sharing settings: you can only create one profile. It is less exclusive, however, as it uses a QR code to share your information, which can be read by anyone with a QR-scanning app.

After entering you contact details and optionally linking your social media accounts, a QR code will be created, which links to your personal Jumpscan profile. Your code can be saved, shared and printed wherever you like. Jumpscan also recommends displaying the code on your own mobile device when meeting new contacts, and allowing them to scan it right from your screen.

Jumpscan is currently in beta testing, but you can sign up to try it now at Jumpscan.com.

How do you exchange contact information? Have you tried any of these apps, or something similar? Leave a comment and let us know what works for you.

Social video is a common prediction for 2012′s social media trends. Here are five ways you can use videos online to promote your next event.

Promo clips

Creating a promo clip gives your audience an idea of what they can expect from your event. This is a great way to give a quick overview of the best parts of your event, which might include mini-events, competitions and giveaways, speakers or performers, interactive elements and topics to be covered. Promo clips can also help you to get across the atmosphere of your event, and remind potential attendees of the dates and where to get tickets.

This Remax Broker/Owner Conference promo video gives a run-down of what the event will cover, who will be speaking, where and when the event will take place and how to get tickets, all in less than a minute.

Bonus content

Using video, you can create bonus content to be used throughout your event or online. Social media channels like Twitter and Facebook are perfect for sharing video content, and in the build-up to your event this could increase interest and engagement. Video content could include interviews, short, informative videos about your industry or products, or just plain fun.

Live streaming

If you have a large audience following your social media updates or live blog from home, adding a live stream could be a great way to involve your audience more. Sites like Ustream, Justin.tv and Livestream let you create your own livestream channel, and most of them allow you to record your stream for people to watch again later.

If you’re new to live streaming, Jeff Hurt has some handy tips on his blog for successfully live streaming an event, including some helpful planning tips, and ways to include your remote attendees.

Wrap-up and thanks

A video wrap-up is a great way to remind your audience (and yourself!) of event highlights and key topics covered, as well as saying thank you to those who made it possible, and those who attended.

The UK’s Conservative Party put together this short video to show the time and effort that went into the planning stages, as well as some highlights from the event itself.

Audience responses

Gathering feedback from your attendees after your event is an important part of the planning process, as this will help you to evaluate and adjust your strategy for your next event. Not everyone likes to leave written comments, so why not encourage video submissions of audience feedback? You could even film these yourself as people are leaving, to get their immediate reactions.

Have you used videos to promote your event? What kind of video has been most successful for you? Leave a comment below and let us know.

Twitter’s recent re-design included the introduction of brand pages, similar to those offered by Facebook and recently, Google+.

Twitter’s brand pages are currently available to specific launch partners only, with a public roll-out due ‘in coming months’.

With the new brand pages come several features to promote your brand, and personalise the page. The first is the header image, which allows a personalised header to be uploaded, including links to other content, company logos, hashtags and other content.

The second is the ability to promote a particular tweet to the top of your own brand page, to highlight a piece of content, a promotion or a particular message. Ad Age also pointed out that tweets including replies or mentions are filtered out when viewing a business page, to further promote the brand’s message.

With only 21 brands involved so far, there are still a lot of questions about the effectiveness of Twitter’s brand pages. A study has already been done, however, by Simple Usability on the most (and least) effective uses of Twitter brand pages.

The Next Web used these results to point out some important tips to remember when creating your own brand page, most of which point to the importance of showing a more human side to your brand. The header image proved to be an effective tool to engage users, when used dynamically – to promote a competition or highlight some other content on the page. Any media embedded in a promoted tweet will automatically expand, so users can see images or watch videos within the brand’s timeline. This proved to be a good strategy, with most users in the study being engaged by rich media found on a brand page.

Until Twitter’s brand pages are released to the general public, brands can still take advantage of the updated design, which creates a more unified experience for users across the web and on mobile devices. Twitter has also created a nifty little addition to the tweet button, with options now including tweets with pre-populated hashtags or mentions, as well as a ‘follow on Twitter’ button, and the standard ‘tweet this link’. For businesses using twitter, these resources will be invaluable in promoting events, as they will organically encourage the use of selected hashtags, or increase mentions of a particular Twitter handle.

Although we are left waiting for Twitter to open up brand pages for now, it seems there are more exciting times ahead for the micro-blogging service, with the first ever live concert broadcast via Twitter taking place on January 11th.

What improvements or additional features would you like to see on Twitter? Do you think brand pages offer enough customization for businesses? Leave a comment below and let us know.

So you want to contribute to the Eventarc blog?

Thanks for your interest in writing content for Eventarc! Here are some guidelines to help you get the most out of this opportunity.

Before you start

Email us at scott@eventarc.com before you begin writing with examples of your previous work and some topic ideas you would like to write about. Please ensure your work is written in clear, Australian English, and be sure to include some personality in your writing.

What to write about

Our focus is Australian event organisers across many fields including education, non-profit, government, small businesses, entrepreneurs and many more. Relevant topics might include:

• event planning and logistics
• promotions and marketing
• social media
• fundraising

Be sure to bring your own ideas and experience when suggesting topics.

Give credit where it’s due

It should go without saying, but don’t steal. Only submit original content that you have created, and make sure everything in your post that doesn’t belong to you is properly credited.

Linking

We love it when guest bloggers link to related content already posted on Eventarc. You can also link to outside sources, providing they are relevant, but please do not include affiliate links.

Our prerogative

We reserve the right to edit your post. We will only do this if we deem it necessary to correct spelling or grammar, or to improve the usefulness of your work for our readers (improving titles or phrasing, for instance). The more appropriate your work is for our audience to begin with, the less we will have to edit it – which is better for everyone! A good way to nail this is to read through some of our previous blog posts to get an idea of what works best. Here is an example to get you started.

We also ask that the content you submit is exclusive to Eventarc.

And for you…

Eventarc received over half a million unique visitors in 2011 from event organisers and attendees. Each guest post we publish will include an author bio, putting your face and your link in front of these visitors.. Your bio should be a couple of sentences about you, including up to two links, as well as a profile picture.

Getting people to talk about your event online is no easy feat, with the overload of information that users are bombarded with these days. Making your event (and the related content you create) more shareable is a good step towards encouraging sharing and conversation around your brand.

Here are five tips to improve the shareability of your event.

Make it easy:

The easier it is to share your event or brand online, the more likely people will be to do so. The key is to take the effort out of sharing as much as possible.

Adding sharing buttons to your blog, website or event page online will make sharing an easy process for your audience. Sharing buttons often let you pre-populate the message to be shared with your content, requiring even less action from your customers.

Using a call to action will encourage this process even more. Ask your attendees or online customers to share your event with friends, encourage them to join the conversation by leaving comments, and thank them for their contributions.

Short and snappy:

By creating lots of bite-sized chunks of content, updates and media, you give people a better chance at digesting the information. Imagine your social media strategy as a magazine all about your event or brand: people like to flip through magazines, passing over content quickly and picking out just the parts that are interesting and engaging.

When sharing your event online, find a story or message for each piece of content or information you share, and then get to the point quickly. Make it short and sweet, so people can take it in easily. Make it exciting and engaging, so they will want to share it with their friends.

Different kinds of media:

Using a variety of media forms will keep your content fresh, and appeal to a wider audience. Audio recordings, video clips and photo galleries can all be effective ways of documenting your event. Adding text through status updates, conversations, white papers or blog posts will add a whole other dimension to your strategy.

Choose the right kind of media for your audience, and for the environment – learn how to use different social networks without pushing all your content into one place, where it might not be welcome. Match the media to your content, as well: an interview may be better represented through video or audio than text, but an in-depth explanation of a new concept might be better suited to an article or diagram.

Provide value:

Sharing information, helpful tips and guidelines with your audience will improve their engagement with your content, and thereby, their inclination to share it. Give your audience a reason for interacting with you online by creating value for them. Develop an online community through your willingness to share with and help others.

Don’t be afraid of giving away all your secrets! The more your audience comes to rely on you for quality, helpful information, the more likely they will return to your events and continue to engage with you online.

Surprises can help:

Take a chance every now and then by trying something new, and surprise your audience. Try branching out into another area of your industry, or introducing a new focus for your next event. Share some behind-the-scenes-style backstage footage that you normally would keep locked away, or try introducing your team to your online community.

By taking risks and trying new things, you will surprise your customers and keep them from getting bored. Be careful to make this an exception, rather than a rule, and you will have a fun way to add occasional variety to your day-to-day strategy.

Do any of these strategies work for you? What other ways do you encourage people to share your event online? Leave a comment below and let us know.

As a social media presence becomes more important for businesses and professionals, you may be wondering how to find a link between your standard business card and the social media profiles you have spent so much time cultivating.

Here are three ways to add your social media profiles to your business card, and show people where to find you online.

Profile names

The most simple and straight-forward way to direct people to your social profiles is to print the actual links on your card. Giving an exact URL removes (or greatly reduces) the chance that people will have trouble finding you online, and is a good tactic if you only have one or two profiles to highlight on your business card.

This simple card design points customers to Rebecca’s Twitter profile – image credit

If you have several social media profiles, you may want to choose one or two to focus on, or use your website as a central hub where people can find links to all of your profiles.

Adding social media profiles to your business card doesn’t mean you have to compromise on the design – image credit

Icons

Simply adding icons of each social network will save space, and if your username on each network is the same (or very similar), this may be enough to help people find you online. If you include your website’s URL, you can provide direct links to each of your profiles from there, as well.

Blenz Coffee uses icons to show customers where to look for the company online – image credit

This may be the best strategy if you don’t want to focus heavily on a particular network, or if your customer-base is widely spread across the social web.

QR Codes

QR codes are a good way to provide instant access to your social media profiles. If you have space for a QR code, and if you want to particularly highlight one social profile over others, this may be worth trying.

Using a QR code lets you include a lot of information without overwhelming your design – image credit

A QR code could be used to display your profile or your (mobile-optimised) website with links to all of your online profiles. It could also contain a vCard of your contact information, including your social media profiles, allowing the person scanning it to save your details directly into their phone.

Each of these strategies will show people that you are active online, and interested in engaging with them through social media. The way you choose to display your social profiles on your business card will depend on your audience, and your online presence.

Have you already added your social media profiles to your business card? How did you do it? Which tactic do you think would work best for your business? Leave a comment below and let us know.

As social media tools and services become so important for marketing your event – and your brand – online, it can be tempting to jump in before planning your strategy. Although it might seem like a good idea to learn about the world of social media through direct experience, having no plan in place can leave you floundering, and wondering whether you’re succeeding or not. Before you get started (or even if you already have), ask yourself these five questions, and put some plans on paper.

Why use social media?

As fun as it can be to jump on every passing bandwagon, an important starting point is working out what your reasons are for using social media to market your event. Social media tools have some great benefits, but these can be hard to come by if you lack direction from the start. Once you know your reasons for trying social media, you can plan what you want to get out of your strategy.

What are your goals?

Developing some short and long-term goals will give your strategy purpose and direction. If your ultimate reason for developing a social media strategy is to improve sales, or attract new customers to your next event, you can use these reasons as a basis for developing some concrete, measurable goals. Working backwards from your ultimate end result is a good way to develop smaller steps for your strategy.

How will you measure your results?

Having goals is not much good if they are intangible. Developing clearly defined goals that you can measure is imperative to a good social media strategy. This will allow you to measure your success (or otherwise), re-evaluate, and adjust your strategy to ensure you are heading toward your goals. Social media offers a myriad of ways to measure your results – fan numbers, engagement, likes, page views, etc. By working out which of these you will measure, you can better determine the best measuring tools to use.

What are your competitors doing (or not doing)?

Looking at your direct competitors, or other brands in related industries can help to inform your strategy before you start planning. Be sure to take note of what doesn’t work, as well as the best practices online.

Where to start?

Researching what is working well for your competitors, as well as carefully developing a plan that takes into account your goals and reasons for using social media, should help you discover the best place to find the right people for your event online. Starting out small is a good way to understand social media and how communities develop online, before scaling up to include more tools and services.

Did you develop a plan for your social media strategy first, or did you dive right into the deep end? What kind of goals have you used to build your strategy? Leave a comment and let us know.

Image and video bookmarking service Pinterest is growing in leaps and bounds, recently reporting a 2000% growth in page views, when it hit 421 million in October. The website offers a simple and aesthetically pleasing way of collecting videos and images from across the web.

As a popular source of design, fashion, shopping and cooking inspiration, Pinterest offers a new way to explore the promotion of your event through visual means.

Exposure for your products

Bookmarked images and videos are collected onto ‘pinboards’, which are organised by title and category. Each pinboard generally has a theme, whether that is a type of product, an industry or simply a colour. By creating a board devoted to your products, you will have an appropriate place to show off new products or services, different uses of existing products, and new development ideas. By keeping this contained to one board, you lose the risk of being “all about me”.

Pinterest uses a tag system, which allows people to search for keywords that you highlight in the description of your ‘pin’ by using the hashtag key. This helps you to point particular searches towards your products, especially because, as Kerry Jones pointed out at blueglass.com, Pinterest search results change as more images and videos are added, giving your business a leg up against higher-ranking companies in traditional search engines.

Share your expertise

By branching out to create other pinboards with themes related to your brand, you can share your industry knowledge and tips with customers. Collecting product images, travel ideas or design inspiration will give other Pinterest users more reason to follow you, besides just keeping up with your catalogue. This is also a great way to provide tips on how to get the most out of your products or services, to encourage more sales during your event.

Expand your reach

Adding keywords to your pin and pinboard descriptions will make it easier to find your collections by searching the Pinterest website. As you curate images from across the web, or re-pin images and videos from other pinboards, you can also add hashtags and descriptive comments. These efforts can attract new customers through interests and industries related to your business. Many people use Pinterest to gather inspiration and ideas, making it a perfect place to find new customers prior to your event, who could benefit from your products or services.

Pinterest is quickly gaining traction with users online, and can be used for SEO, as each pin is created with a link to the original image source, as well as for the social community building that social networks are famous for.

For those who would like an invite to try out Pinterest (as the service is still in beta stage), please leave us a comment with your email address and we’ll share with you the few we have up our sleeves!

Live-blogging is a recent trend that has been seen at all kinds of events – from tech industry events to news coverage, to the Academy Awards. Essentially live-blogging means to continually update a single blog post in ‘real-time’ as the event unfolds, noting the highlights as they take place. Far from making it unnecessary to attend your event, live-blogging offers many benefits in promoting your event and increasing audience numbers in the future.

Let’s take a look at three ways this could lead to an increase in future audience numbers.

Add more value for those already attending

For those who are already at your event, the better it is the more likely they will return in the future. Live-blogging your event (which includes using micro-blogging services like Twitter can add more value for those in attendance.

By highlighting the best features, activities or performances as they occur, you will encourage a better experience for people who may have missed those highlights otherwise. You can also add background information during the event , to explain or increase understanding of information during Q&A sessions, panel discussions or presentations. Not only will your attendees be able to follow along during the event if they have mobile Internet devices with them, but if you keep the blog post available after the event, they can catch up on sections they may have missed when they get home.

Show off the best parts for those at home

If you have customers who are interested in your event but are not able to come along, keeping them informed as the event progresses is a great way to show them what they are missing, and encourage them to attend next time. Highlights as mentioned above are useful for people at home, as well as extra information they would be able to get if they were attending your event. Using media such as video highlights, audio interviews and photos will help those at home to get a better idea of what the event is like, and whether they would like to be a part of it. This may also be a good time to offer a discount or promotion on tickets to your next event!

Increase interaction and engagement for all

The great thing about live-blogging is that it happens as the event takes place. This means that those at home who play along, and those keeping track while at the event, can interact with you (and each other!) as the event unfolds. Collecting reactions and comments from your attendees is a great way to add ‘real person’ opinions to your live-blog, to give an unbiased view of the event to those who are not attending. You can also take this opportunity to answer questions about your brand, and the activities taking place during the event, or to run a competition with those who are attending.

By getting people engaged and interested in what’s happening, you can offer a well-rounded view of what your event is like. Showing highlights of the event and comments from those who do attend can increase excitement (and jealousy!) in those who were not there. If you take this opportunity to run a promotion or discount on tickets to a future event, you may be impressed at the increase in sales as a result of your live-blogging efforts!