General
Weekly Quiz Social Media
Social media can be a powerful tool, the power of which can be harnessed to help promote your business – it can also be counter-productive.
I will at the outset apologise if this blog is a tad drier than some we’ve posted but I hope you’ll find the contents useful.
Whereas we typically talk about social media as a single entity it is of course a collection of different platforms, each designed to serve a different purpose, albeit many of them can intercommunicate. For example, you can link your tweet to Facebook so that if you post on one it’ll replicate on the other (and you can control in which direction this occurs).
So, let’s look at a few of the main players individually, how to use them to help promote your events, indeed how we at Weekly Quiz Ltd use them, and feel free to copy our techniques if you find them useful.
The daddy of them all – functionality is continuously being upgraded – Facebook can do more this week than last and no doubt some new sparkly facility will be added next week. There are basically two different platforms within Facebook you can use as a business and both are free to set up… first there are groups, useful if you want a free exchange of ideas and discussions where (subject to settings) any member can post or comment – better for a business is to set up a “page” where the owner and any appointed administrators have greater control over content. You can of course within the page post events that are added to your pages’ diary and you can invite potential customers (those that have “liked” or “followed”) to attend, all for free – you can of course pay to boost both posts and events to a wider audience but if you’ve been clever at attracting your local customers onto your page anyway, then normally you won’t need to.
Posts should be colourful, include a GIF or picture and have enough detail to allow customers to attend without having to contact you.
Often referred to as “micro blogging” due to the tight character restrictions for any tweet (currently 280 characters) so you must be economical and catchy with your tweets – it helps to be irreverent and humorous from time to time to encourage additional followers. It also helps if you follow twitter users who may have an interest in your events as they may be already reaching the people you’re trying to attract.
Twitter also supports hashtags (a word or phrase without spaces preceded by the # symbol) – try to include relevant tags in your posts, look at what’s trending (you’ll know it is as twitter will offer autocomplete suggestions as you type – try typing “#Monday” for example) but keep them relevant – no point adding #AskingForAFriend if your promoting a pub event night as it won’t encourage retweeting. Again, a GIF or picture can add colour and interest.
Think Twitter but picture rather than word driven. The picture tells the story with the added caption filling in the blanks… choose your pictures with care as that’s what will attract people as will hashtags within the description.
Instagram is owned by Facebook so using the two together is encouraged but again you control how and when.
Weekly Quiz Social Media
OK, not strictly social media but we have to shoe horn the self-promotion somewhere – specifically aimed at quizzers, check out the first, (to the best of our knowledge) only, and the finest quiz finding search engine in the world! Every venue we support has their own full web page including an interactive calendar and users can search by day of the week, location , postcode or even partial pub names…
Others
There are others of course – but these are either not popular enough (yet?) or not really suitable as marketing tools.
You may however want to checkout Snapchat, Google + or Reddit which may be of some limited use, but you may conclude that they are more trouble than they’re worth.
See you out there in cyber space but don’t forget that the very best social media is still face to face word of mouth, printed posters, flyers and even chalk boards at the venue itself!