Twitter promotions is a great way to excite your audience about your upcoming webinar.
Social media, specifically Twitter, is an ideal channel for webinar promotion. Twitter offers something for every marketer and all budgets, from organic (free) promotions to paid advertising. In addition, with 186 million active users daily, promoting your webinar on Twitter can introduce new users to your brand and drive registrations for your webinar.
Preparing for Your Twitter Promotions
Before launching your Twitter webinar promotions, decide on a hashtag for your event. Creating a hashtag will provide some consistency in your pre-event promotions and build momentum for the live event. It will also help users to find content about your webinar, and will allow participants to use the hashtag to tweet their learnings. When setting up your hashtag, try to keep it short, so it’s easy for people to use and doesn’t take up too many of your 240 character limit. Be sure, too, to do your research— test your hashtag on Twitter first—- is anyone else using it? Is your hashtag appropriate for your audience and industry?
Sometimes even the big brands make a blooper. This hashtag error by Entenmanns was innocent…pun intended…but an unfortunate error nonetheless. The baked goods giant unknowingly launched a #notguilty campaign the same day the verdict was released in the Casey Anthony trial. What was intended to be a lighthearted tweet about the joy of eating donuts, instead landed them in a heated discussion about the trial. Lesson learned: keep your hashtags appropriate for your brand and always do your homework before using them.
Content for Your Twitter Webinar Promotions
Twitter is a personal RSS feed of headlines and topical conversations. Twitter users turn to the platform to stay up-to-date on trending news, happenings in their local community, and the professional world. Think of your webinar promotion as a PSA for an upcoming learning opportunity for others in your same space. You have much knowledge to share, and your webinar promotions should communicate your expertise.
Because Twitter limits messages to 240 characters, you’ll need to keep your messages short and benefit-driven. You’ve likely already crafted the messaging for your webinar registration page, so as a starting point, pull copy from there and break it up into “bite-size” Twitter promotions. As an example, “what-you-will-learn” bullets provide great promotional value and are ideal for tweets. Create a separate tweet for each bullet point to keep content short, focused, and impactful.
Other suggestions to keep your content interesting:
Run a Twitter poll related to your topic.
Once your poll closes, tweet about the results and invite people to learn more at your webinar.
Promote and tag your speakers.
Social networks are just that: social! Promote your speakers using their names and pictures, and tag them! You’ll add credibility to your message and extend your brand exposure and reach. For best results, promote one speaker at a time due to the limitations in tweet characters.
Pose a question or stat related to your topic.
Using a stat or asking “did you know” grabs attention and opens a conversation. Or in this example, the question is asked, but the answer will be provided at the event— a smart way to intrigue people and prompt them to register:
Run a countdown.
To build pre-event excitement, why not talk about your webinar preparations? Let your audience know about your planning. Additionally, running a countdown or even something as simple as “only XX days left” creates a sense of FOMO, prompting people to jump on board. Be creative!
Vary Your Webinar Promotions
Don’t be afraid to run different styles of webinar promotions, too. Some of your tweets might be simpler and straightforward, while others are more whimsical and fun. People respond to different types of messaging, so mixing it up will help you attract a larger audience. Just be sure all of your webinar promotions are appropriate for your brand, and all of them include a call to action such as “register,” “sign up,” or “join us.”
Though your copy may be varied, stay consistent in the look and feel of your images and graphics to create a cohesive marketing experience throughout your promotional period.
Frequency of your Webinar Promotions
Everyone always wants to know, how often should I be tweeting about my webinar?
The answer is as often as you can without coming across as Spammy. In other words, the frequency of your webinar promotions largely depends on what else you are tweeting about. If your Twitter queue is only webinar promotions, your users will quickly get fatigued from promotion after promotion. It’s better to tweet 80% content and 20% promotions— throw in a few tweets about recent content in between your webinar promotions. The variety will keep your channel fresh without shouting your marketing message.
Overall, your company should be publishing tweets about every 3 hours, though not all of them will be webinar promotions. But, of course, that’s a lot of tweeting! Watch your Twitter analytics to see if people are unsubscribing (meaning you should cut back and publish less frequently) and if your efforts are making a meaningful impact on your marketing objectives. (Evaluate the effort put in vs. the outcome received.) You can always adjust your frequency based on what you learn about your audience and what’s most successful for your brand.
When scheduling your posts, be sure to vary the times your webinar promotions are published, too. For example, if the first promotion went out at 11:00 am, schedule it for 3:00 pm the next day. Twitter is an active and fast platform, so varying your publishing times may catch users who are only on in the afternoons and evenings vs. the morning hours.
Avoid repeating tweets, as it’s against Twitter’s rules. Reword any tweet you want to rerun.
Contentware has produce it’s own version of the optimal distribution schedule for marketing a webinar. This includes not just tweets, but email and other social media platforms as well.
Event Day Twitter Promotions
Your webinar day has arrived!
Twitter is a great channel to promote last-minute registrations due to the immediacy of the platform. Promotions such as “last chance to register” or “it’s not too late” can bring in 10% more registrations. Of course, you’ll want to schedule your “day of” promotions early in the day, to allow people time to see and respond to your message before your webinar begins.
When your webinar goes live, in your opening comments, remind participants of your hashtag (and even better, include it in the footer of your webinar slide deck!) and encourage tweeting during the event. Often, participants like to tweet about what they are learning— it’s sort of a modern approach to taking notes, not to mention attracts interest to the topic and your brand. To get the most out of live-tweeting by webinar participants, plan to have a staff member watching, responding to, and retweeting tweets used with your webinar hashtag. When you engage with tweeters, they’re more apt to tweet more. Plus, it’s great content for your followers, too!
Twitter is an exciting platform and can help to generate excitement for your event, too. Twitter may be your hidden marketing gem for promoting your webinars, but you won’t know until you test it. Create a hashtag, develop your content for tweets, then schedule and publish your tweets, making adjustments based on your results. Twitter is a platform that you gain experience and confidence as you go— and you’re well on your way to webinar promotion mastery.
Want more tips on how to effectively market your webinar? Download our free guide, The Ultimate Guide to Webinar Promotions, and Read, “How to Promote a Webinar Using Social Media“.
Contentware us AI and your landing page to create an entire marketing campaign for your webinar – in minutes. All you do is build the landing page and Contentware does the rest. Want to see it in action? Sign up for a free demo!
