Last week, Ireland celebrated the opening of its longest off-road walking and cycling experience. The Waterford Greenway runs 46km from Waterford City to Dungarvan, and the Springboard team was delighted to be part of this project. #WaterfordGreenway was trending for four days around the official opening on Twitter, while on Facebook, followers have grown to 18,300. It showed what can be achieved with effective social media marketing.

USE AN EVENT HASHTAG

Unite your tweets under one umbrella. Using a specific hashtag is the perfect way keep track of the conversation, engaging industry leaders, brands, businesses and more. At Springboard, we utilised #SpringInYourStep around our sponsorship of the 2017 Cork Chamber Dinner. We always put aside time to respond to others with retweets, likes and mentions to make sure we get the maximum engagement, building an audience and creating a buzz around your event on Twitter.

INVEST IN PPC

With Facebook advertising you can specify demographics, specific interests, careers and more. This works well when you have one key message to deliver to a very small audience. Sometimes for events, you may not be able to justify the spend on traditional advertisements, but allowing a budget for PPC can definitely boost your social media campaign in a targeted and efficient manner.

Click here for 5 reasons why you should be using Facebook advertising

USE VIDEO CONTENT

• Visual content is 40x more likely to be shared
• In 2015, the number of videos posted per person on Facebook increased by 75%.
• Instagram’s video option increased in popularity by 40% in six months.

With these stats in mind, why wouldn’t you use video to your advantage? Align your content with the key messages for your social media campaign, before, during and after any event to ensure maximum engagement.

Click here to get ideas on videos you can create for your campaign

USE A CALL-TO-ACTION (CTA)

When you post on social media, don’t forget your call to action! Prompt your audience to take immediate action, making it very clear in each post what you would like them to do.

Do you want them to share a post? Register now? Buy Tickets? Make an Appointment?

INFLUENCER ENGAGEMENT

Get innovative and try collaborating with influencers, or popular personalities in your target industry. For example for Waterford Greenway, we reached out to sporting persons, influential Waterford people and national organisations amongst others to ask them to get them involved and share our key messages. 

Discover 4 ways you can collaborate with influencers here

Post by Susie Horgan

Susie founded Springboard in 2011, and has developed the business into a leading, director-led communications agency. She has worked for over 20 years in senior marketing and public relations roles.