Social Media

Event Promotion

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?

  • 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.
  • Use #Brandeis on social media platforms, 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 Facebook & Instagram Story event roundups

Audience: Current and prospective students
How: Be sure to submit your event to the Campus Calendar at least one week prior to the day of the event to ensure it is posted publicly to the Calendar.

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.

 

Strategic marketing support

Do you need more help? Reach out.