Social Media

Event Promotion

While events should not be the only content that you share on social media, social media can be a major driver to help grow your event audience.

Before you share your event on social media, be sure to submit your event to the Brandeis Campus Calendar, the university's central, comprehensive events calendar. The calendar informs and connects the campus community and the public on the wide array of events offered at Brandeis.

Event promotion should only be a small part of your social media content mix. Try to keep event promotion to 15% or less of your content. You want to encourage your audience to engage with you in other ways so that the algorithm serves your more serious content, like events, up more frequently.

How to promote on your own channels

You've booked the room or scheduled a Zoom meeting, identified speakers and planned activities. Now how do you get people excited to attend?

  • Create a Facebook event and invite faculty, student leaders and participants to join the event and share with their peers. The more people who indicate that they are going to the event, the more additional people will see the event appear in their newsfeed.
  • Design appropriately sized and high contrast graphics. Canva offers both free and paid versions of their cloud-based graphic editing program that is easy to use. Brandeis' ITS provides staff with the Adobe Suite of programs, including InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. For high-profile events, Integrated Design may work with you on promotional material.
  • Use #Brandeis on Twitter and Instagram, and make sure to geotag @BrandeisUniversity on Instagram. By using hashtags and geotags, your content is aggregated with other content that uses the tags. This increases your visibility among the Brandeis community, including students, staff and faculty. Consider including other relevant hashtags on Instagram if your event is open to a wider audience.
  • Share more than once in different ways. Don't be afraid to remind your audiences about upcoming events! Consider other types of content, such as throwback photos, news stories related to lecture content or trivia questions, to promote your event.
  •  Partner with cosponsors or other departments on campus to reach out to their audiences on social media.

Social media is just one facet of event promotion. When planning your event marketing content, remember to also send emails, hang flyers, share in related classes and include in newsletters to your audience. Only a fraction of your audience will see each individual social media post, and your potential event audience is larger than your following.

How we can help

The main Brandeis University social media channels reach a broad array of audiences. While event promotion is not a core part of our strategy, we offer a few ways to help elevate your events to a broader audience and drive traffic back to your social media channels.

Weekly Instagram Story event roundup

Audience: Current and prospective students
How: Send us an email or direct message on Instagram with a link to information about your event and a digital graphic to share by the Thursday before the week of your event.  The event roundup is scheduled for Sunday evenings. This graphic should be sized for Instagram Stories at 1080px by 1920px with at least 100 pixels free from text as a buffer around the edges. We can also accept square images. Please avoid wide images or images with lots of small text. Remember that these images will be viewed on mobile devices, so text should be large enough to read and high contrast.

Instagram takeover

Audience: Current and prospective students
How: Identify a student who is involved with your event to take over the Brandeis Instagram account. We require takeovers to be submitted at least one business day in advance in order to add captions, so a student can use this oppportunity to highlight how they are involved in planning and preparing an event.

Facebook events

Audience: Alumni, parents, current students
How: We consider community events for addition to the Brandeis University Facebook page events listing. Create a Facebook event associated with your department, school or program's Facebook page. Send the URL to the event to Leah Steele or direct message the Brandeis University Facebook page to be considered. Be sure to share the event on your own page and ask people affiliated with the event to indicate that they are attending the event.

Strategic marketing support

Do you need more help? Reach out.