The reality is that webinar promotion can be incredibly expensive. The amount of money some people spend on advertising to draw people to their sign-up or webinar landing page could cause you to doubt whether or not hosting a webinar event is a profitable idea.
Fear not if you’re on a budget, though, because, with a webinar promotion plan, it is still possible to get the word out for free. Below, we share organic social media tips and best practices on how to promote webinars. You’ll want to bookmark this and use it over and over again!
In this post, you’ll learn:
- Six effective organic webinar social media posts examples to promote your webinars
- How to reach wider audiences
- Other ideas to promote organic webinars besides social media
6 Organic Social Media Tips to Promote Webinars
Social media can be extremely powerful for promoting webinars if the right mix of elements is in place, considering that there are 4.9 billion users worldwide. With the targeted post, strategic hashtags, and thought-out content, you can make people aware of what you are offering, so they can participate.
Here 6 top tips to help get your webinars noticed through organic social media posts that will help attract attention and build lasting relationships with your audience
1. Create a collection of unique updates you can use for your webinar marketing strategy.
When it comes to promoting your upcoming webinars, the last thing you want to do is sound like a broken record on social media. No one wants to see the same updates on social media over and over again about your presentation. Ouch! It’s harsh but true.
At the same time, you have to promote your webinar multiple times to get the message across to a larger webinar attendance. Therefore, your goal when promoting your webinar with social media updates is to create a sizable collection of unique updates.
You can start by searching Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest to see how others promote their webinars on those networks to get some inspiration. Then, mimic the social media promotions that resonate the most with you.
If you’re promoting a live webinar on social media, your updates should be time-specific. You can even create multiple unique social media updates that allow you to count down the time until your live webinar. Countdowns and timers are highly effective in getting the attention of your social media audience because they instill a sense of urgency and FOMO (fear of missing out). After all, no one wants to be left out of something that could be important to them.
In addition to the text, it’s good practice to include images for your social media updates. Images capture people’s attention more than large blocks of text. Canva has hundreds of free templates you can use to create professional images for your social media updates quickly. And, with Canva’s acquisition of Pexels and Pixabay, you also have access to hundreds of free stock images for your webinar promotion.
If you’re promoting automated webinars on social media, you have a couple of options. You can make your updates timeless, focusing on the benefits of what people can learn about your webinar’s content. These types of social media updates can be used to attain your webinar’s marketing goals, allowing people to discover them at any point in time to lead them to your webinar.
You can also make them date-specific if you know you will be running multiple webinars daily. That way, you can at least promote your webinar weekly or monthly using a hint of urgency.
Whether you are promoting live or automated webinars on social media, you will want to mix in updates that are not webinar-related so that people will not go to one of your profiles or pages and see nothing but webinar promotions. If you have the time, it’s best to do a mixture of curated content updates (links to content about your niche or industry) along with updates that engage your target audience (ask questions, share quotes, etc.). If you want marketing automation for your social media updates, you can do so through content curation and the right set of tools.
Sendible is a great social media management tool that allows you to share updates automatically from RSS feeds to most of the top social media platforms. You can share it directly to your Facebook (profiles and pages), Twitter profiles, LinkedIn (profiles and pages), Google+ (pages only), Pinterest, Tumblr, and others. But we’ll get to that in the next section.
This approach will also ensure that you have lots of additional updates in between your webinar promotion mentions. For your audience, the additional social media content will give them the incentive to follow and tune in because you’re sharing relevant information that helps them get to know, like, and trust you. If they are following you closely to see what content you share, then you know they are interested in being educated about your niche. This tells you they are your ideal audience, primed and ready for your webinars.
The key to great content curation (automated or not) is to choose from the right news sources. You can use sites like Alltop to help you find the best blogs in your niche or industry. If you are automating curation, make sure those blogs always publish content you want to share with your audience. You don’t want to post anything from your competitors or anything that goes against your products or services (i.e., you don’t want to share a blog article about how email is dead when you offer email marketing services).
2. Post-event updates regularly to different social media platforms.
The best way to ensure that you promote your upcoming webinars to your target audience is by scheduling event updates on social networks. For live webinars, you can schedule all of your updates to entice them to register for your webinar up until it goes live. For automated webinars, you can schedule weekly or monthly promotions or webinar content as you see fit.
Sendible, Hootsuite, Buffer, and MeetEdgar are just a few social media scheduling tools you can consider to take all the updates you curated in step one and schedule them to post across all your profiles. This is great for people who like to batch their social media content all at once because you’ll be able to share frequently without worrying about whether or not you remembered to post something for the day. The social media tool you choose should work with the webinar platform you want to promote your virtual events on and have marketing automation options you want to ensure your webinar is promoted correctly, along with other great status updates.
3. Pin posts about your upcoming webinar to the top social media profiles and pages.
Another way to keep your webinar promotion going strong is to pin updates to the top of your social media profiles and other relevant pages. Once you have posted an update about your webinar on your social media accounts, like your Facebook page, you can use the arrow at the top right of the update to pin it to the top of your page’s news feed. You can do this within Facebook groups that you own and run as well.
On Twitter, click on the three dots beneath your latest tweet about your webinar. This will put your latest webinar promotion tweet at the top of your Twitter profile.
If you are pinning social media updates for live webinars, be sure to set a reminder for yourself to remove pinned Facebook posts and tweets after the live event has ended. If you are pinning updates for automated webinars, be sure to make them timeless. It ensures that anyone who sees the update will be encouraged to register based on the webinar topic and benefits, not on the timing. You’ll also want to update your pinned updates regularly so that your pinned post isn’t old. This can make your audience think it’s outdated, even if it is still a valid link.
4. Update your social media cover photos for even more webinar promotion.
The cover photos for your social networking profiles and pages are great for real estate to promote your latest webinars. You can add cover photos to your Facebook pages, Facebook groups, LinkedIn Company Pages, Twitter profiles, Google+ profiles and pages, and YouTube channels. Canva, the free online image editing tool mentioned earlier, has templates you can use to create cover photos for each of these networks. Some templates can work for multiple social media networks.
Your cover photo should follow the same guidelines as a pinned update. If you are creating cover photos for a live webinar, be sure to update them after the live event has ended. If you are creating cover photos for an automated webinar, be sure to make the cover photo timeless so that people will be encouraged to register whenever they see the photo. For your Facebook page cover photo, once you have uploaded it, click on it. You will get the option to add a description to your cover photo.
By doing this, anyone who clicks on your cover photo will get a clickable link to your webinar registration form. This also works for cover photos on Facebook groups. If you have a LinkedIn Group that you run, you can use this strategy there too.
5. Add social media sharing buttons to your webinar registration and thank you pages.
To give others a chance to help you promote and attend your webinar, you can do so using customized social media sharing buttons. These call-to-action buttons can be added to your webinar’s landing page and can be customized to share a specific message. To start with, let’s look at the Twitter Share a Link button.
To make a call to action button, you’ll need to create buttons that, when clicked, will lead people to tweet a specific message about your webinar. It has to include a link to your signup page. Be sure to change the options as shown above to tweet a specific URL instead of the page URL and a detailed message instead of the landing page’s title. Once completed, you can test your button by clicking on the preview.
Note that the message can be previewed and edited by anyone who clicks on the tweet button before sending it. You can follow a similar set of steps for Facebook using the Facebook-like button.
For the Facebook like button, you will simply enter the URL of your webinar registration page as the URL to Like, as shown above. You can then click on the Like or Share button in the preview to see how the update will appear for people who choose to click one of those buttons.
The information used in the update is pulled from the URL you entered in the URL to the Like box. You may want to update your registration to include Facebook Open Graph tags to use a specific page title, page description, and preview image.
You can also create buttons to allow people to share your webinar with their LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ audiences. Be sure to look for the setting to change the URL to your webinar registration page and customize messaging when possible.
If you’re a StealthSeminar user, you can contact our support team to learn more about implementing these buttons and open graph code on your webinar registration page.
When promoting live webinars with social media sharing buttons, you will want to include dates and times in the customized messaging and image. When promoting automated webinars, make your customized messages as timeless as possible so that they are always applicable, no matter when someone might share them.
6. Partner with other webinar producers for social media promotional exchanges.
If you have a large audience, you may want to partner with others who produce webinars in your niche or industry but are not direct competitors. It’s as simple as sending them an email that does the following.
- Introduces you and your business.
- Explains the main benefit of your webinar – what you teach and how your attendees will benefit from the education – and how that applies to their audience.
- Shares some information about the product or service you are offering at the end of the webinar.
- Share the details of your audience – size, demographics, and interests.
- Asks if they would be willing to promote your next webinar in exchange for you promoting their current or upcoming webinar.
You may want to interact with your potential partners through social media networks first to know them and get on their radar before sending a cold email. This will likely help you get more positive responses to your promotional request. It’s best if you can find promotional partners who offer the same kind of webinars you offer. If your partner provides live webinars, they will understand that timely promotion is of the essence.
If your partner offers automated webinars, they will understand that timeless promotion is the best way to go. As a bonus, you may find that your promotional partner may also make a great guest speaker or host for one of your webinars, helping you further drive new webinar attendees to your webinars from their audience.
Additional Organic Webinar Promotion Tips and Ideas
While we’ve mainly covered social media as a means to organically promote your webinars in this blog post, additional ideas for your next effective webinar promotion strategy include:
- Writing guest posts for other websites in your niche with your backlink redirecting to your signup or landing page
- Including the signup link in your email signature
- Posting to Medium.com and Quora and using your bio link as your signup or landing page
- Writing relevant blog posts on your own website page and optimizing them for SEO to garner more organic views via search engines which could lead to additional signups
Note: These organic webinar promotion strategies work best with evergreen webinars.
We dive deeper into these and more free ideas and ways to promote a webinar landing page in this post.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, there are various ways to promote both live and automated webinars on social media organically. Once you have set up a great webinar promoting your products and services, start implementing these promotional strategies alone or in conjunction with paid ads to boost webinar registrations, rack up revenue for your business, and hold a memorable and successful webinar. You can also use these techniques to promote upcoming webinars.
Do you have any other social media examples on how to promote a webinar you can share? Share them with us on Facebook and Twitter. We cannot wait to learn about them.
This article was originally published in August 2015 and was updated on September 19, 2024.
