Using social media to promote events

For the last 8 or 9 years I have been holding DJ events in and around the Halifax area mainly due to a lack of good quality house music available locally. When my friends and I first started holding events, at least a month before we would start with the promotion to spread the word. This was made up of designing flyers/posters and distributing across the town and surrounding areas. Although this was and still is an effective method of promotion it took a lot of time and effort to make sure the area was covered in prime locations.

Then came along the social media boom, with myspace, facebook and Youtube at the forefront. Introduction of online social media created a snowball effect for people using it more and more to connect with friends and using it’s tools to help promote up and coming events/share music/video/photos etc.

So as these sites gained in popularity I took advantage of this to tell the world what events are going on. Not using this method is without doubt selling yourself short to gain popularity of events. Facebook is the first port of call for whenever I am setting up an event by simply uploading related artwork, adding content telling people in detail, where? When? Who’s playing etc. and then distributing across my network. Then telling my friends to invite their friends and so on……after the event I add photos and video from the night to share with people who could or couldn’t make it.

Other nights such as the legendary Back To Basics (the longest running weekly club night in the world) uses Facebook heavily, posting information on events each week. See the below link:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/event.php?eid=101739476531177&ref=ts

Here is a link to my next event:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/event.php?eid=10150136403150301&ref=ts