Events are social, sports fans and music lovers go to events with their friends, sharing the experience before, during and after the event is part of the fun. So connecting fans’ social experience from events with the promotion of events over social media seems like a no brainer. However this seemingly basic concept isn’t fully implemented yet by event organizers.

Here are 5 tips of how to use social to drive event sales:

Create Social Stickiness

Fans and potential ticket buyers perceive information from social media as any other kind of information. There’s nothing special about it anymore. Social media interaction must be leveraged towards recurring consumption of the information by the fans and encouraging them to get constantly updated. Otherwise, communicating your event over social media is not so different than display ads or email marketing. Make sure your fans have a reason to get updated again and again.

Empower your fans

Fans like to feel special and that they are more than just consumers. You can even say that they want to be part of the event. Give them some means in which they can influence the event; chose the pre-show music, provide 2 options for half-time entertainment, or even ask them what would be there preferred special food offer – hot dog or hamburger?

Identify social brand ambassadors

There will always be different levels of engaging fans. Some will just click “attending” or buy a ticket, but some will tweet, post, like and share their excitement for the upcoming events. The latter are your brand ambassadors and you want to nurture their social media activity.

Reward and incentivize social sharing

Fans can be encouraged to invite friends, share the event’s information and post their event related activity. There are many ways to incentivize these activities: free extra tickets, upgrading seats, reward them with free merchandize food and drinks. The costs of these rewards are a very good investment in social promotion.

Use Real-Time Analytics

Social monitoring tools are very helpful for evaluating social trends, identifying brand ambassadors and extracting actionable data. Which links drove the most traffic to your page and which users posted your event and invited their friends? Using free online tools and specialized social promotion services enable you to maximize your social marketing efforts and drive more sales.

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18 – 29-year-olds make up 60 percent of Github, 85 percent of Orkut, 70 percent of DeviantArt and 60 percent of Reddit. In contrast, users older than 30 make up 65 percent of Facebook, 55 percent of Twitter, 65 percent of Pinterest and a not surprising 80 percent of the industrial hub LinkedIn. How are all of these users influencing each other? Not as much as you might think. “Likes” and “+1s” won’t get you very far: only 12 percent of users pay them any attention.

Age dictates sharing behaviors, as well. While 75 percent of older users (age 45+) share through email, 50 percent of users between the ages of 30 and 44 share using Facebook, as do 60 percent of users aged 18 – 29. But most of them can agree on Facebook’s search feature: 70 percent of social media users don’t use it. And 50 percent of users don’t care about images in search results.

What else can they agree on? Privacy. With all of the recent chatter about privacy and who has access to what online, it’s no surprise that 75 percent of users object to sharing private search data.

From 2011 – 2012, time spent on social media has increased by roughly 30 billion minutes. Pinterest lead the way with a 1000 percent increase, while Google+ showed an increase of 80 percent. Facebook showed decrease of 4 percent, but Mark Zuckerberg’s probably not crying himself to sleep just yet.

What 2013′s user look like? That remains to be seen, but it’s fair to speculate that they’ll spend as much, if not more, of their time on social media.

Infographic courtesy of Survey Monkey.

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In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin shares his thoughts on why you can’t just be an SEO anymore. With changes in how sites are ranked over the last few years many areas traditionally outside of the realm of SEO including social media, branding, and design are now integral component of any effort to improve search engine ranking.

Despite the fact that SEO is now a truly integrated practice that involves all aspects of online marketing the perception of many executives and managers is still based on the days when SEO just meant link building. As a result, when approaching SEO their is a tendency to silo or confine team members and consultants responsible for improving search engine ranking from other aspects of online marketing and branding.

To help combat this trend, Rand proposes that a reframing of SEO or a change in how search engine optimization experts present themselves and their services might be advisable. He suggests that doing so can help to unlock the true potential of an organizations online marketing efforts while also improving SEO professionals access to marketing budgets.

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Click-Through Rate – Google 2.00% vs Facebook 0.05%

Average CPM – Google $1.60 vs Facebook $0.15

Revenue Per $1 on Advertising – Google $2.00 vs Facebook $3.00

Now on to the statistics on Adwords and Facebook advertising….

When you compare the amount of ad revenue generated by the two ad platforms Adwords earned a whopping $43.69 billion while Facebook only brought in $4.28 billion. That works out to $24 per user for Adwords and only $2 per user for Facebook. However, when looking at mobile ad revenue Adwords only made $2.18 billion compared to Facebook’s $0.34 billion in 2012.

With the majority of the $88.58 billion in advertising revenue from 2012 coming from paid search, $43.20 billion to be exact, it is no wonder that Adwords near monopoly on search advertising delivers such a huge amount of revenue for Google’s Adwords. When combined with the display advertising offering provided by Adwords Display Network it is no wonder that the amount of revenue earned from the top 10 advertisers on Adwords is significantly greater than Facebook. In total, Adwords earned $450.20 million while Facebook only earned $124.69 million from their top 10 advertisers.

It gets really interesting when you look at ad market share in the US. Globally Adwords dominates Facebook with a 44% market share compared to Facebook’s 3.10%. However, if you just look at the US, Google’s display ad market share is actually smaller with only 16.50% compared to Facebook’s 16.75%. With the average Google user spending 101:50 minutes per month vs Facebook’s 414:00 minutes per month it is not surprising that Facebook beats out Google in the US despite having almost 1 billion fewer monthly users.

As the role of mobile, search and Facebook’s platform continues to evolve it will be interesting to see what ad platform provides the best bang for the buck for advertisers and brings home the big ad revenue over the next 3-5 years.

Infographic courtesy of E-Intelligence.

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In this segment from Standford Business School, Dana White discusses the role of social media on the growth of the UFC.  According to Dana social media has played and continues to play a huge role in the UFC’s growth both in the US and in international markets. As an active users of social media platforms including Twitter Dana see the shift to instant information, communication and constant engagement as a critical component of any media franchise.

The UFC has actually lead the way in embracing social media and online platforms. They were the first organization to live stream fights on Facebook. Dana also regularly hosts video blogs that receive upwards of 250k to 1 million views, and live streaming shows that out rank many TV shows.

By leveraging the power of social media and embracing new technologies to increase distribution, engagement and communication the UFC is able to continue to fuel growth at a rate that far exceeds almost any other sporting events.

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1. You don’t have to sacrifice readability. The right color scheme can actually improve readability of your logo.

2. Don’t be afraid to stand out from the crowd. If all your competitors use the same colors for the their logo do something different and make your company stand out.

Infographic courtesy of British Logo Design.

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How do you harness the power and energy of online communities and participatory culture for civic and political good? That is exactly the question that Henry Jenkins raises in the video introducing the questions he is currently examining to better understand how empowered groups of individuals can make a positive impact on society.

Jenkins defines participatory culture as one that everyone participants in producing, consuming and sharing media be it a skateboarding or a politically motivated video clip. Within these communities a folk culture develops as participants share together and learn from one another. This culture produces a bond and unites people around a shared sense of ideas that can serve to make a powerful difference.

In the video one of the key examples mentioned is the Harry Potter Alliance. With over 100k members worldwide this group uses the fantasy world created in the Harry Potter series about good fighting evil to mobile a large number of people to participate in issues around the globe such as the situation in Darfur.

As online communities, social media and participatory culture becomes a more and more prevalent component of society Jenkins proposes that we think about how we can reframe the way we think as citizens and mobile these newfound skills to make positive change on a global level.

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Learn a few key insights from this highlight reel of marketing guru Guy Kawasaki’s speech at Social Media Breakfast in Auckland. During the speech Guy lays out the three qualities necessary to be enchanting in marketing, social media and life:

1. Like-ability

2. Trustworthiness

3. Competence

During the speech he also emphasis the importance of a bottom up strategy as opposed to a top down strategy that previously dominated marketing prior the advent of social media. To achieve this button up groundswell Guy advocates that you constantly curate great content, plant many seeds, and engage with people.

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Make Social Sharing Easy

Make it really easy for people to share information about your event on social media. Add social sharing buttons to your website and include QR codes that will load promotional tweets. Consider making a video greeting that can be shared on Facebook, Google Plus, etc..

Discounts and Contests

Everyone loves a good deal and winning prizes. Design a combination of discounts and contests to engage participants and give them an incentive to help get the word out. Make sure to include a hashtag (#tag) when announcing discounts, contests and winners. If possible get influential speakers and participants on board. Ask them to promote the event or conference to their followers, network and email list.

Leverage Storytelling

Storytelling is an extremely powerful way to engage and connect with potential participants. This can be as simple as asking speakers a couple questions and then converting it into an email transcript or blog post. If you have the time and resources planning a webinar with a few speakers is one of the most powerful methods to build interest and tell a compelling story. You can also record the webinar, edit it into short video clips to share via social media.

During the Event

Promoting communication via social media during an event is an import component of driving registrations for your next event. Before the event make sure you have adequate wifi for participants! If possible display a Twitter feed at the event and promote the use of a hashtag (#tag). When driving participants to engage via Twitter make sure to have a team member monitoring and interacting with people on Twitter.

Don’t forget to record everything! Film speakers, interview participants, exhibitors and take lots of photos. All the media collateral you produce at the event can be used to promote your next event. If you have the capabilities you might want to consider using a live streaming service such a ustream.com. This will do wonders to help fuel the social media conversation during the event. If planning to stream the event live make sure to let people know a head of time.

After the Event

Once the event is over the real social media work begins. Send all participants a survey to get feedback and testimonials, and share the best ones via social media. If you haven’t already done so connect with participants on popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This will make it easier to continue to build a relationship with them and market other events. If you were able to produce video and take photos of the event edit it in a timely manner and publish it via social media. Share it was participants and send copies to speakers for them to send to their network.

With a little planning and follow through, a well thought out social media event promotion strategy can do wonders for your brand and significantly increase the number of attendees to your events.

Infographic courtesy of Socialized.me.

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Recent Twitter convert and respected journalist for the Guardian Jon Henley shares the role Twitter played in his recent piece on telling the stories of people in Greece. Before heading to Greece Jon tweeted that he was looking for stories of hardship and self help. By the time he landed he had hundreds of crowd-sourced stories and on the ground insight.

According to Jon, Twitter enabled him to discover and connect with people that would not have otherwise been possible. Throughout his trip he was amazed at how people within Greek communities were working together, volunteering their time to help on another. Twitter also enable him to have a dialog and empowered people to share their feedback and appreciate for the work he was doing directly with him.

At the end of the video clip Jon shares his belief that social media is a powerful tool for journalists because it gives them extraordinary access to people like never before.

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