Promote Your Next Speaking Engagement For High Visibility and Engagement

Promoting your speaking engagements is an easy way to keep your audience updated on where you are speaking, your thought leadership topics and, if it’s a public event, allow registration to the event. Strategically promoting your speaking engagements via social media and other marketing tactics helps to funnel your events out to various segments of your audience. Here’s how to promote your speaking engagements prior to, during and after the event.

10 Tips to Promote a Speaking Engagement Prior to the Event

Once you have confirmed that you will speak at an event, make sure to publish this information on your website’s event or speaking engagements section. Depending on your target audiences, you will need to strategize which social media platforms are most effective. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will provide the essential coverage for your speaking engagements. Here are some other tips on how to promote a speaking engagement prior to the event:

1. Start promoting your engagement at least a month prior to the event.
2. In addition to including the conference registration information on your website, add it to your email signature, and eNewsletter.
3. Create a blog post about the event and highlight sessions colleagues will be speaking at, tips on navigating the event, event city highlights, and recommended social activities at the event.
4. Email contacts to let them know you are speaking and include all of the pertinent information about the event.
5. Include the event and subject matter hashtags on all of your presentation slides and social media posts.
6. If you are speaking on a panel, include the Twitter handles of the other panelists.
7. Track the hashtag for the conference on Twitter and interact with people discussing the event.
8. Create your social media posts by tailoring the content for each network because each platform has a different style and audience. Twitter is short, but LinkedIn needs a more professional tone.
9. Incorporate an image into your posts with the event information such as the time, date and venue. Some events will provide speakers with images that you can use in your social media posts.
10. For ease of creating multiple social media posts at one time, use a social media scheduling tool such as Hootsuite. Hootsuite allows you to post 30 scheduled messages on three social media platforms a month for free.

Promote a Speaking Engagement During the Event

Take control of your audience while you are on the stage by allowing them to engage with you. You can easily do this by adding your twitter handle (and the handles of your co-panelist) and event hashtag on each of your presentation slides. Encourage your audience to ask questions via Twitter, but be prepared to take time after the presentation to reply to Tweets directed to you.

Pre-schedule a Twitter Feed to Publish During the Event

Furia Rubel has a lot of success pre-scheduling Twitter feeds for speaking engagements. Prescheduling social media posts is an ideal way to keep an audience immersed while you are speaking because it provides an easy way for them to share slides and promote your presentation in real time.

Here are the items you will need to create a scheduled Twitter feed prior to a presentation:

1. Twitter scheduling tools such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, Tweetdeck, or Co-Schedule.
2. Date, time and length of presentation.
3. Final PowerPoint presentation.
4. Twitter handle for all presentation participants.
5. Hashtags for conference and subject matter.

To create the pre-scheduled Twitter feed:

1. Review the presentation and pick out the slides that you would like to feature in the feed. (For a 1-hour presentation, 10-12 slides scheduled throughout the hour is plenty.)
2. Create a Word document outline of your Twitter feed. For each Tweet include:
   a. The time you would like the Tweet to post. (Time the tweets about 8-10 minutes apart; give a good estimate of when the presenters will be presenting each slide.)
   b.   Slide image
   c.   Brief description
   d.   Event Twitter handle and hashtags

Here’s an example of a recommended layout for each Tweet in your Word document. Organizing the Tweets in a Word document first will save time when posting to your scheduling tool:

Example:

Tuesday, January 14 at 9:45 a.m.

Join us in 15 minutes when @GinaRubel @MgMcCreary @sfduarte74 and @FBINewark present Privacy and Security Training: Ethical Obligations of Digital Confidentiality and Safekeeping for lawyers and judges @philabar #BenchBar19

What can I do with speaking event materials after it takes place?

No matter how engaging a presentation you give, you won’t be remembered for too long if you don’t engage your audience after everyone goes back to their busy lives. Reference and distribute your content in other ways post-event. Here’s how:

1. If your speaking engagement was videotaped, have the video transcribed and post it to YouTube, your website, and social media.
2. Create a whitepaper, blog or article about your speaking topic. Post it to your website and pitch your topic idea to industry media. Remember to also share on social media.
3. Connect with those that attended your speaking event on social media and send them your presentation materials.
4. Ask for a speaking testimonial that can be added to Google My Business, LinkedIn profile or website.

Speaking is a dynamic platform for increasing your visibility, credibility and name recognition. While it can be time-intensive to prepare presentations and promote the event before, during and after, it’s worth the effort in the long run.