How to Promote a Webinar on Social Media: A Definitive Guide

So, you’ve planned an amazing webinar—one that’s almost guaranteed to turn leads into customers. Congrats! The eternal question for event marketers is probably still plaguing you: how do you get people to show up? What’s the best way for promoting webinars? How to promote a webinar on social media?

The answer in 2022 and beyond? Social media marketing.

If you’re not promoting your webinars on social media, you’re already behind the curve. Social media is one of the best places to attract and connect with the widest audience possible. 

If navigating social media feels like a murky labyrinth worthy of the Minotaur, you’re in the right place! In this article, we’ll walk you through the details of promoting webinars on social media. Particularly on the most used channels Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

The Basics: The Right Content, No Matter the Platform

No matter which social media venue you’re using to promote your webinar, you’ll need the right content strategy to make viewers engage. Before diving into the specifics of each platform, let’s check the basics of social media webinar promotion. 

1. Use Visuals

Compared to social posts with no images, those that use images get almost double the views and engagement. So, if you want your content to get noticed in 2022 and beyond, images and video are non-negotiable. 

The most straightforward option for including visuals is to reformat your landing page’s featured image or graphic into the right dimensions for each social media platform. 

Since many casual scrollers may not look at anything besides the images, it makes sense to incorporate as much of the crucial information about your webinar as possible—including the time and date, topic, and featured speaker(s). 

Get creative with the types of visuals you use, too. Consider using infographics, video clips of your featured speaker, pull quotes, slideshows, data visualizations, and even memes and GIFs to capture your audience’s attention.

2. There’s Room for a CTA, Even in 240 Characters

By nature, social media posts are short and sweet. It can feel difficult to fit all the information you want into a tweet or Instagram caption—but whatever you do, don’t leave out the call to action (CTA). 

Each post should have a desired action for the reader, which always should be to click through to your landing page.

When writing your call to action, be sure to use strong action words, create a sense of urgency, and highlight the benefit to the reader whenever possible.

3. Use Clips and Content from Your Featured Speaker

If your webinar will include a featured speaker, capitalize on their personality and following. Have they written any interesting blog articles lately? Do you have clips from their last presentation? Or perhaps they’ve posted a funny (but appropriate) tweet that you can retweet with a comment.

However you manage to loop your featured speaker in on the promotion process, you’ll find that doing so helps you humanize the event and reach the guest speaker’s wider audience at the same time.

4. Partner with Other Brands/Influencers to Cross-Promote to New Audiences

Similarly, influencer marketing is a great way to humanize your event and reach a bigger audience. You can (and should) purchase ads, but there’s something powerful in using real people to advocate for your brand as well. 

Look for bloggers in your niche or past attendees who have used your event hashtag, then double-check their audience size using tools like Klear or BuzzSumo. They don’t need to have a massive following; in fact, micro-influencers tend to have better engagement. 

Simply find individuals or brands with a decent reach and the right reputation to fit your goals, then partner with them to promote your webinar across their social media channels.

5. Offer Incentives for Signing Up

When creating your webinar promotion content calendar, don’t forget to find ways to incentivize your audience to register. 

Announce that the first 50 registrants will receive a discount or prize, or mention registrants’ usernames in shout-out posts. Creating a sense of excitement around your event will help give people that extra push they need to sign up.

6. Optimize Your Social Media Profiles

Before starting your promotional strategy, make sure all of your social profiles are optimized to promote your next webinar. 

Many social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn allow users to pin posts to the top of their profile. Make the most of this ability by pinning your webinar announcement post so that any visitors to your profile will be informed of your upcoming event right away. And on Instagram, make the URL in the link in bio your registration landing page. 

Another way to optimize your profile is to update your profile photo or header image. Create a customized cover photo—perhaps based on the graphic on your landing page—for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to inform visitors about your webinar.

And don’t forget to add social sharing buttons everywhere you can, from landing pages to emails, to thank-you pages. Optimize everything about your webinar signup experience for social sharing so that new registrants can easily spread the word to their own audiences. 

Promoting Webinars on Social Media: How to Promote a Webinar on Facebook?

Facebook often feels like a strange mix of old friends posting life updates, intrusive ads, memes, and Farmville updates—but with an estimated 2.91 billion monthly active users in the third quarter of 2021, your business can’t afford NOT to promote your webinars on Facebook.  

Of course, since it’s such a behemoth, it can be tricky for brands promoting their webinars to find the right tone, content style, and audience.

You’ll need to cultivate a consistent and appealing brand marketing strategy to cut through the noise on Facebook. 

Start by creating a business page, if your organization doesn’t have one already. This page is your home base and the launching pad for all of your posts, promotions, and events. Encourage your staff to share your business page’s posts and like the page, which helps increase the organic reach of your Facebook promotions when you create them.

Create a Facebook Event for Your Webinar

Facebook has extensive event launching features, making it a great place to expand your webinar audience. 

For your attendees who RSVP as “going,” their Facebook friends will see their status about the webinar in their own news feeds. Each registrant you gain on a Facebook event creates an ever-widening ripple effect that casts news of your webinar to a bigger audience than you would have reached on your own.

And what’s more, creating a Facebook event is a simple and quick process. To get started, head to your homepage, click on the menu grid at the top right corner of the screen, and select “Events.”

On your events page, click “Create New Event.” Then, choose which profile or page will host the event. If you have a business page, select that option from the dropdown menu in the left column. 

Then, click through the options to create your event. For a webinar, you’d most likely want to choose “Online,” then the “General” event type. You can also choose whether to charge admission to the event or keep it free of charge.

Next, scroll through the options to add details such as an event name, date and time, location, description, and a header image. 

You’ll also be able to choose how attendees will access your event. Unless you’re hosting your webinar on Facebook Live, you’ll want to add the external virtual room link or other instructions for joining the event when it starts.

Once you hit “Publish,” you’ll see a prompt to boost your event. 

If you select this option, you’ll be directed to the Facebook Ads dashboard. We’ll cover paid advertising in more detail below.

Don’t forget to share the event once it’s created! 

Share the webinar on your business’s main Facebook page, ask your staff to share the event page on their personal profiles, and consider sharing it to relevant Facebook groups and pages as well.

When to Post on Facebook to Promote a Webinar

At Contentware, all we do are event promotions. And how to promote webinars on social media is one of our strengths. Contentware uses AI and a 2-3 sentence description from your event landing page to create an entire marketing campaign for your event – in minutes.  Contentware takes care of image acquisition, copywriting, production and optimization, and scheduling – saving you hours upon hours.

Our expertly trained algorithms recommend posting to your webinar event page at least six times (once or twice per week) to get as many eyes on it as possible. Our suggested schedule looks like this:

• Announce the event four weeks prior to the event
• Follow up with another announcement post the next day
• Then, post reminders or invitations to register at least once per week in the remaining weeks leading up to the event. 
• Finish up with a last reminder one or two days before the event.

The best times to post on Facebook are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays between 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM ET. And if you’re posting on the same day, leave a few hours between them to avoid clustering your posts.

How to Promote a Webinar with Social Media Advertising—Facebook Advertising

Facebook has a robust advertising apparatus, which can also be more cost-effective than advertising on some of the other top digital advertising platforms. In fact, it costs an estimated 25 cents to a dollar per 1,000 impressions on Facebook, while the same number of impressions would cost anywhere from $2.75 to $8 on Google AdWords. 

To begin advertising your webinar, click “Boost Event” on the event page, which will take you to the Facebook Ads dashboard. Here, you’ll be able to design and customize an ad campaign for the event.

First, choose a description and cover image for your ad to refine how it looks to your audience. 

We recommend using an information-rich header as the image since many Facebook users won’t look past the graphic before moving on. In your image, include vital information such as:

• Title
• Date and time
• Featured speaker

You can also define your target audience by location, gender, and interests—or, you have the option to advertise only to people who like your page and their friends.

Finally, choose a duration and end date for your ad campaign. Facebook shows you the estimated reach of your ad per day, along with the budget you’ll need to spend on the campaign.

Once you’ve begun the promotion process for your event, keep an eye on it. Facebook provides analytics on each post’s views, reactions, and interactions in your business suite dashboard—so use the information from each event cycle to refine and improve your promotion process. You can experiment with ad formats, budget, and new ad frequency to see what works best for you.

For more tips on promoting your webinar on Facebook, check out our article: How to Use Facebook to Market Your Webinar.

How to Promote a Webinar on Social Media: LinkedIn

While Facebook is a casual platform that’s a lot like Forrest Gump’s “box of chocolates,” with an eclectic mix of life updates, memes, conspiracy theories, and educational posts, LinkedIn is much more homogeneous. 

LinkedIn is a social media platform designed for professionals, and it contains mostly career updates, industry blog posts, and networking threads. If you’re catering to a B2B audience (which is a common situation for many webinar marketers), you need to be promoting your webinar on LinkedIn.

Your audience on LinkedIn will be professionals looking for a way to level up in their career, whether that be by finding a new skill or learning how to do their current job better. If your webinar helps them with either of those things, LinkedIn is the right place to show them. 

Driving LinkedIn Engagement Starts with a Vibrant Brand Presence

While LinkedIn can be one of your greatest assets for appealing to a professional B2B audience, the platform is also famous for dry and sales-y posts. To maximize engagement, create organic posts that provide thought-provoking and/or informational content. Don’t just advertise your upcoming webinar and decide that’s enough. 

The best way to drive engagement for your webinar is to build an engaged audience with your LinkedIn activity. The top-performing content on LinkedIn usually falls into one of these categories:

• Articles and blog posts
• Tips and tricks
• Thought leadership
• Infographics, images, and native video content
• Industry news

Your audience wants to be educated and entertained in the few minutes they’re scrolling LinkedIn during a coffee break at the office; so if you catch their attention with quality content, they’ll be more likely to give you more of their time.

Techniques and Best Practices for Webinar Promotions on LinkedIn

Contentware recommends promoting your webinar 2-3 times per week in the month leading up to the event. 

The best times to post on LinkedIn are Tuesday through Friday between 9:00 AM and 3:00 PM ET. And because your LinkedIn audience is almost exclusively professionals looking for concise solutions to help them progress in their careers, match your posts to this expectation. 

Your content should:

• Highlight the value to be earned from attending the webinar
• Be unique; it can seem like every B2B business is hosting a webinar these days. Why should the average LinkedIn user choose to give yours their valuable time?
• Spotlight the featured speaker(s). LinkedIn users want to network and learn from industry experts, so leverage the social power of your speaker to attract even more registrants

Here’s Contentware’s rendition of optimal LinkedIn posting schedule.

How to Promote a Webinar on Linkedin—Take Advantage of LinkedIn Events

In early 2020, LinkedIn launched its own Events tool—and according to LinkedIn internal data, 6.3 million members have attended virtual events on LinkedIn since. 

Creating an event on LinkedIn gives you a page to share on the platform, much like Facebook. LinkedIn gives creators the option to host events on LinkedIn or (as you’ll likely want to do) link to the online location where the webinar will be held.

To create a LinkedIn Online Event, start by navigating to your LinkedIn homepage and clicking the “+” icon next to Events in the left-hand column.

The pop-up screen will ask you to fill in details about the event. Choose a header image and profile picture that reflects the webinar. From the Organizer drop-down, choose whether your personal profile or your business page will host the event.

From there, fill in as many details as possible, including the event’s name, time and date, description, and publicity settings. 

You can also tag featured speakers’ LinkedIn profiles so that they’re listed in the description section. This feature is an easy way to invite featured presenters to share the post with their own LinkedIn audience.

Once you’ve created the event, you’ll be invited to share it with your followers. You can also share the event at any time from your event page dashboard:

Your event dashboard also lets you invite connections, create posts, and see data analytics about attendees and event visits.

Once your event has been created, start sharing it. You can share it in a post to your newsfeed or send it in a private message to your connections. And get creative with it, too; share the event with relevant LinkedIn groups to reach an audience that may not otherwise see it. 

LinkedIn Advertising

Sponsored content will help you increase your event’s exposure even more than organic posts and sharing will. If you’re marketing to a primarily B2B audience, it may be worth your while to invest in paid advertising on LinkedIn.  

There are a few different types of LinkedIn ads:

• Sponsored content, or ads that appear on the user’s home feed
• Sponsored messaging, which takes place in automated private messages
• Text ads, which are PPC or CPM desktop ads
• Dynamic ads, which appear in sidebars and in search results and are targeted to your chosen demographics

Sponsor well-performing organic posts to reach a larger audience, and design dynamic or text ads with a clear call-to-action. No matter which ad format you choose, remember to keep your focus on the value readers can gain from attending your webinar. 

For more tips on using LinkedIn in webinar marketing, check out our article: How to Promote a Webinar on LinkedIn—10 Ways!

Promoting Webinars on Social Media: Twitter

Twitter is like an online conversation that never ends. That means content expires fast—in fact, the life expectancy of a tweet is only fifteen minutes. 

So to successfully promote your webinar on Twitter, you’ll need to tweet a great deal to gain enough traction. We recommend tweeting 25-30 times in the month leading up to the webinar. 

Contentware’s optimal posting schedule for Twitter calls for tweeting three times per day. And twice a week for the four weeks prior to your event. The best times to post on Twitter are Monday through Friday between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM ET. Plus, be sure to leave at least three hours between same-day tweets.

But while you might be tempted to tweet the same content over and over, avoid that urge. In recent years, Twitter has cracked down on duplicate content in an effort to prevent spamming.

So, while you need to tweet a lot, each tweet needs to be unique. 

There’s no getting around it; you need at least 25 fresh and engaging tweets just for a single webinar. Tired just thinking about it? We get it. That’s why we created Contentware, which generates entire email and social media marketing campaigns for you in just a couple of minutes.

Use a Webinar Hashtag

Because Twitter depends so much on hashtags for its users to discover and interact with content, use hashtags in your campaigns. Find trending hashtags that relate to your event by using the explore tab to find what people are already using. 

And don’t be afraid to create your own hashtag for the webinar, either. A hashtag is a great way to help your audience connect with each other and promote conversation around your event. When designing an event hashtag, remember the following tips:

• Make it easy to remember (and spell)
• Capitalize each word
• Don’t use more than two hashtags per tweet
• Avoid using a brand slogan or corporate-speak. Instead, come up with a hashtag that communicates a simple message while being fun and inclusive.

And don’t forget to incentivize people to use your hashtag—perhaps through a simple retweet or a real-life prize. 

Mention Registrants on Twitter

Consider asking for registrants’ social handles so that you can mention them after they register for the event. 

Of course, this should be an optional field on your form. But for those who agree to it, mentioning and engaging with them on Twitter can shed even more light on your event. Highlighting real people who are attending can create a bandwagon effect that results in even more signups.

Here’s a more post that goes into greater depth on promoting your webinar on Twitter for free.

How to Promote a Webinar with Social Media Advertising—Twitter Advertising

Another way to ensure a large audience sees your posts is to pay to promote them using Twitter advertising. Promoted ads appear in users’ feeds just like any other post from accounts they’re following. This fact helps you get noticed by Twitter users who don’t necessarily follow you.

To promote one or more of your tweets, head to Twitter for Business and click “Start a campaign.” 

Click “Create an ad,” which will take you to a dashboard where you can create your first ad campaign. You’ll need to choose an objective, such as maximizing your reach or driving traffic to your webinar landing page.

Then, adjust the ad’s settings to match your goals. You’ll need to define a budget, set target demographics, and choose from among a few targeting features such as keywords and audience interests.

The best and most cost-efficient way to use Twitter advertising is to have a strong understanding of your target audience. Knowing who will be interested in seeing your promoted tweets—and defining them in your ad’s audience preferences—will maximize your ROI.

Check your Twitter Analytics regularly to see helpful data such as your audience demographics, profile visits, impressions, etc. That way, you can tweak your promotion tactics in real-time to maximize the effectiveness of your content. 

During the Event

Twitter can be an amazing engagement tool up to and including the event date. Consider live-tweeting your webinar as it’s happening. 

To live-tweet your event, choose a member of your team to tweet screenshots, clips, and impressions in real-time. Make live-tweeting easier on the day of by setting up some templates. Using design software like Canva to quickly capture thoughts and quotes.

Another option is to use your custom hashtag to host a “Twitter Chat” during the webinar. These chats are a great way to engage with audiences and get more visibility at the same time. 

Here’s how a Twitter Chat works:

1. The host (brand or individual) begins the chat with a tweet, usually a conversation prompt. The tweet includes the branded hashtag (for example, #FreelanceChat)
   
2. Participants answer questions and interact with each other’s tweets using the branded hashtag. They can either reply to the first tweet or simply tweet on their own. It doesn’t matter, since everyone’s comments will appear when the hashtag is searched.
   

Twitter Chats are excellent real-time conversations you can have in public with webinar participants. This helps increase your webinar’s visibility (and shows non-attendees what they’re missing). 

For best results, be sure to tweet out the hashtag you’ll be using ahead of time. So, your audience knows what to look for in a Twitter Chat.

Promoting Webinars on Social Media: Instagram

While at first glance Instagram may seem like the wrong place for B2B promotion. Hence, don’t dismiss it as a viable marketing option right away. Did you know that Instagram is the sixth most visited website in the world? 

81% of users rely on the platform for making purchasing decisions. Plus, 50% have visited a website to make a purchase after seeing it promoted on Instagram.

(Image source: Hootsuite)

It makes sense to use such a popular app to get in front of your target market. Especially, since users are primed to find new brands and services on Instagram.

Instagram Rewards the Human Element

Instagram is a highly visual platform, so when promoting your webinar using Instagram, images and videos should be the central component of each post. And according to Disruptive Advertising, the types of content that perform well on Instagram include:

• Industry-related influencer posts
• Community engagement
• Behind-the-scenes
• User-generated content
• Tutorials and tips
• Content that engages with pop culture

The throughline for all of these post types is that they center on the human element of your brand. Partnering with influencers (AKA human ambassadors), showing the behind-the-scenes life of your company, and highlighting your customers with user-generated content helps Instagram users build a sense of trust in your brand.

So, What Does This Look Like When Promoting Webinars?

In our experience, you’ll see the best results by posting at least five times (or once or twice a week) in the month leading up to the webinar. In your posts, get creative about showing your audience you understand their pain points and how attending the webinar can solve them. 

Be authentically human for the best results. For example, you could:

• Create a before-and-after post of one of your clients who has been successful using the tips you’ll provide in the webinar
• Have your featured speaker act as the “influencer” by posting about the webinar on their own feeds
• A staff member could record less-formal Reel videos taking viewers behind the scenes of your event set-up 
• Build anticipation with a series of countdown posts
• Use Instagram Stories to show teaser clips of what viewers can expect from attending the webinar
• Use screenshots of past attendee testimonials (with their permission, of course) to show your audience the benefits others like them have seen from attending your webinars

Don’t Skimp on the Captions

While the image should be the focal point of each post, the caption is where you’ll do a lot of heavy lifting. Each caption should complement the post well and be engaging enough to draw readers in. 

Inform your followers about the webinar’s topic, the benefits to be gained from attending, and how to sign up. Most often, you’ll want to direct readers to use the link in your bio to visit your webinar’s landing page and register.

And of course, don’t forget to use hashtags. Because Instagram users generally use hashtags to search for and follow topics that are of interest to them, using a relevant hashtag can broaden the audience for your promotional posts. 

Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags per caption—but a more reasonable number to shoot for is between 3-10 hashtags per post. 

It’s also a good idea to create a unique webinar hashtag. Use it each time you post about your webinar, and encourage registrants to use the hashtag in their own posts as well. 

Instagram Advertising

For maximum reach and engagement, you may want to add Instagram to your paid advertising mix. 

Instagram Ads are controlled through Facebook Ads Manager. And it gives you a lot of granular control over your ad design, performance, and audience demographics. You can target users who have previously interacted with your brand. Those whose interests align with your webinar, and users who behave and appear similar to your already-existing customers.

To boost an Instagram post, visit your Facebook Ads Manager dashboard. Alternatively, you can navigate to Instagram for Business and click “Create an Ad.” 

You’ll be taken to your Facebook Ads Manager dashboard, where you can customize your promoted post. Choose where you want to drive traffic (such as to your website or to a private conversation in Messenger) and set a budget and schedule for the campaign.

You can also customize the targeted audience by location, age, gender, and detailed demographic targeting. 

The more specific (and accurate) you can be about your target audience, the higher your ROI for each advertising campaign.

How to Use Social Media to Promote a Webinar—Wrap-Up

The world of social media is constantly growing and evolving, meaning it can be intimidating to dip your toe into marketing your webinar on social media. But platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram can be an unmatched resource for finding leads and attendees. 

Organic and paid social reach can get your brand in front of a wider audience than you ever thought possible. The key is to use plenty of visuals and creative content. And to dial into the unique aspects of each platform to use each to its best potential. 

And, of course, you’ll need to post a lot—and then post some more. But knowing when to post is often just the beginning; even large marketing teams struggle to generate enough content for multiple channels to effectively market a webinar. With Contentware, most of the work is done for you. 

Want more tips on how to market your webinar effectively? Download our free guide, The Ultimate Guide to Webinar Promotions.

Contentware uses AI and your landing page to create an entire, branded marketing campaign – in minutes. Want to see it in action? Sign up for a demo!