There are at least nine ways to promote your speaking engagements.

I’ve tried a variety of ways to promote these types of engagements and increase attendance – whether at my own events or as a guest speaker. The tips in this blog post apply whether it is an in-person or virtual event.

 

Prepare to Promote Your Speaking Engagement

  • Make sure your presentation title is short, catchy and understandable. You need to grab people’s attention right away, and that’s what the title will do for you.
  • Include a short description of your talk with key words woven into it. Bullets are a great way to get more white space when you create such a description. Doing so is critical when you use that description to promote the speaking engagement on social media.
  • Customize your bio to fit the subject of your talk. Make sure that you show you have the professional background to speak on the topic. However, don’t get carried away with discussing your credentials or adding too much generic information about yourself.

 

Promote the Speaking Engagement via Social Media

  • Create excitement and anticipation by posting on social media about your talk a few weeks out from the event. Be sure to post again a day or two before the event and more often if you wish.
  • When guest speaking, ask the person who invited you when and where they are posting about the event. Go to the social media site(s) where they are posting and comment on their post(s). In the comment, be sure to tag that person and the entity to whom you are speaking.
  • Encourage others in the group (your own or the one you are speaking at) to share posts about your speaking engagement on social media.

 

Promote the Speaking Engagement Via Your Newsletter or Blog

  • Write an article about your speaking engagement in your newsletter (if you have one). Take this approach whether it’s your own group where you are speaking or you’re the guest speaker at another’s group.
  • Dedicate a blog post to your upcoming speaking engagement.
  • Whether it’s a newsletter article or blog post, write about the organization where you are speaking. Tell the readers why it would be valuable for them to attend your talk.

 

Bonus Ideas

After your presentation, you can continue to draw attention to your speaking engagement. Consider writing a newsletter article or blog post about the experience. Be sure to include photos taken at an in-person event, or screen shots from a virtual event.

If there is a recording of your talk that’s available publicly, be sure to include a link to it. For example, I record the presentations at the monthly meetings of my Simplify Your Social Media Meetup group. Then I upload those recordings to a playlist on my YouTube channel. As soon as I publish these new videos, I wrote posts on LinkedIn and Facebook with links to the videos. Here’s a LinkedIn post with a link to a recent presentation I gave to my Meetup group.

 

About Joyce

Joyce Feustel helps people, especially those age 55 and up to be more effective using social media, with a special focus on LinkedIn and Facebook. She works with business owners, business development professionals, business consultants, job seekers, and more – ranging from entrepreneurs to people in large corporations. Find her at www.boomerssocialmediatutor.com