The last decade has seen LinkedIn grow into a social media giant with an impressive community of over 850 million users. Recent studies have shown that nearly 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn, making it an ideal platform for marketing teams worldwide. One trend that has emerged on LinkedIn is the promotion of events by organizations across various industries.
By leveraging the expertise of their professional teams, influencers, and speakers, organizations can elevate their brand while also generating leads through exclusive events. In this guide, we will examine ten highly effective strategies for promoting events on LinkedIn. Our tactical guide addresses important questions such as creating and promoting an event on LinkedIn, the best ways to launch your event, and more. We will also look at some great examples of LinkedIn event posts from successful marketing campaigns.
What does the LinkedIn Events feature do?
Have you ever hosted & promoted an event on Facebook? If yes, then LinkedIn events should make you feel just right at home. By creating a LinkedIn Event, you’ll be assigned as the event’s organizer to provide details and invite attendees.
Events can be both in-person and online. However, LinkedIn Events does not provide a digital venue to host the event itself. You’ll need to send out invites to provide permission to attendance for a private event. Attendees can connect and engage in the feed, making it a potentially invaluable tool for community-building.
Since the event doesn’t have to be held on LinkedIn, this means you get a no-strings-attached engaging channel that can get the eyeballs of B2B decision-makers. Why wouldn’t you use it?
What are the types of events that are best promoted on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn users have the highest average income of any social network, so don’t believe the myth that LinkedIn is just for business events. LinkedIn is one of the best social media platform to promote any event in 2023.
LinkedIn events include conferences, networking events, a LinkedIn events webinar, and trade shows, but you can also promote music events, yoga classes, cooking classes, etc.
10 Strategies to Promote Events on Linkedin
LinkedIn provides marketers a remarkable opportunity to promote live events to attract new audiences and consistently engage with their existing customers. Here are ten simple strategies that we regularly suggest at Think Orion to promote LinkedIn events:
1. Share Your LinkedIn Event With Your Network
Since LinkedIn is a professional social platform, it rarely promotes your event marketing campaign across all member feeds, so some work is required.
Professionals establish that your event social posts will be mostly seen on the feed by those who have confirmed participation in the event; others will need to search. Therefore, it is an excellent opportunity to begin your LinkedIn promotion from your company profile and personal account.
This enables your posts to reach the most relevant audiences, and you can request your network to share posts with their followers. A great example of how to promote your event on LinkedIn comes from Ankor Software.
Below is how the company is marketing the event on LinkedIn through their company and personal profiles:
In addition, LinkedIn has now changed event rules, allowing events to be discoverable by search, with attendees and non-attendees able to view the social posts before, during and after the live event.
2. Share Posts on your LinkedIn Event Feed
LinkedIn events have their own unique but closed feeds & conversations that only attendees can view. Although the event is publicly available to view, the content within the event feed may not be available to everyone and only to those who receive the invite.
The great idea is to create interesting content around the event that outlines what it will include, who the speakers are, and other welcome messages for attendees. To engage attendees, your content should encourage them to ask questions, create discussions, and even introduce themselves to build a sense of community.
HubSpot’s LinkedIn event post example using images and speaker profiles
It’s a great idea to integrate videos, images, gifs and whitepapers to encourage shares and discussions from your attendees. A brilliant tip that professional marketers offer is to encourage your guest speakers to share the event with their personal networks.
Here is an excellent example of sharing videos and demos for a Google Cloud webinar by WebMagic Informatica:
3. Request Speakers to Promote Events Via Their Personal Networks
As we mentioned above, it is an excellent idea to tag your guest speakers’ profiles on the event page. The comment section, now available for everyone to comment under the event page, allows you to generate engagement through comments and enables participants to add members who will be interested in the content by simply tagging them in a comment.
To ensure visibility across the platform, marketing professionals should test videos, polls, and announcements to engage audiences consistently and thus stay top of the mind. To learn more about organic posting and optimizing reach, look at our guide to LinkedIn marketing.
Expand.io discussed that they developed short 20-30 second video promos with their speakers to enhance the reach & visibility of one of their events. The short videos, they claim, allowed them to stand out, promote the event with a more human connection, and introduce the speakers to audiences.
4. Use Engagement Pods To Reach a Larger Audience
LinkedIn engagement pods can be an effective virtual event marketing strategy for Edtech companies looking to increase the reach and engagement of their live events. Hootsuite explains engagement pods as “a group of people who systematically agree to connect & engage with each other’s content on the platform.”
Engagement pods aim to create buzz around an event post before it becomes extremely popular. So, when LinkedIn members see it on their feed, they assume it’s already popular and will be more likely to interact with it.
The LinkedIn algorithm itself promotes posts that have increased engagement within 20 minutes of publishing claims by Stefan Smulders, the SaaS entrepreneur. Consistently creating appealing & attractive content enables your engagement pods to engage relevant audiences continually.
There are two types of engagement pods that you can choose from to work with on the LinkedIn platform. An automatic pod is usually software that connects you to other profiles looking to create a content-sharing community, and they can comment on your posts while you can do the same for them.
A manual pod is a more organic way to build a community that will share and comment on your content in real-time. It is preferable since the comments are high quality and the LinkedIn algorithm considers it a credible engagement. Manual pods require you to join different LinkedIn groups and build constructive relationships to boost your event posts.
When looking to promote through pods, a highly recommended tip is to engage with a professional event marketing agency to assist you throughout the process.
5. Post on Industry Relevant LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn groups are one of the most effective options for enhancing event visibility and participation. Industry-relevant groups allow you to interact with interested audiences, join relevant discussions, share your opinions, and increase followership for your brand.
It is imperative to ensure your content and conversations are meaningful. Spamming comments and content are one of the most criminal acts considered in LinkedIn groups leading to permanent bans.
A great way to market your event posts is by creating a dedicated group that will serve as the central community for all future events. Engagement pods are an excellent way to share posts and content to increase followers for your group.
6. Create LinkedIn Polls
LinkedIn event marketing guidelines recommend publishing polls on the event page to increase engagement and excitement around events. The guide also identifies using polls, asking questions, and thought starters up to two times a week for better results.
Polls are an excellent way to discover sentiments and opinions without browsing through hundreds of comments. If your goal is to approach poll participants for sales later on, SaaS professionals discuss that you can use a different marketing copy to approach both sets of audiences.
Explain.io identifies the following virtual event best practices that can make your LinkedIn polls extremely lucrative for events:
- Ask a question or make a statement in your poll, and request followers to answer respectively
- Include interesting topics for your audience, primarily around the event or the problem that you aim to address
- Share your polls across social platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and others
- Identify the most engaging polls from the results since these will determine what to focus on in the event
Below is a simple example of a research poll from McKinsey & Co:
7. Send Connection Requests to Attendees Who Aren’t in Your LinkedIn Network
One of the most popular LinkedIn event’s best practices is actively managing the list of attendees who have agreed to join your event. Once attendees have accepted, you will see them listed on the right side of the event page.
When you click the See All button, you will see the details and connection status of all attendees. While it’s a great idea to greet and talk to your existing followers, connecting with attendees is more important than being in the connections list. So, start by sending attendees outside your network requests to reach more visibility across new profiles.
This will allow you to add new interested audiences, like a snowball effect, where your new connections will also share the event within their network. Consider sending personalized messages and requesting connections to share the event post with members who will find it beneficial to attend.
8. Run Creative Linkedin Ads
LinkedIn offers a highly intuitive paid ads manager, similar to Facebook, that allows more visibility and extended reach to your event posts. These LinkedIn ads that appear on the right side of LinkedIn feeds are a popular tactic for marketers looking to enhance event visibility quickly.
LinkedIn also offers businesses the opportunity to promote their events within the news feeds of members as “sponsored content.” The platform also offers a brilliant ads marketing guide to promote events to help marketers.
9. Direct Messages
One of the simplest and most straightforward LinkedIn event promotion tactics is the direct message option via messenger. Professionals recommend that you promote your event through direct messages. While free accounts can send up to 50 messages simultaneously, Sponsored InMail allows unlimited messages, even those not added to your network.
Remember that the trick here is to create personalized direct messages for each recipient. Marketers should also remember that spamming members with event promotion messages are not beneficial, so consider a message 2 to 3 weeks apart. Finally, remember that LinkedIn is a professional network and requires the highest standards of social media event marketing.
10. Set up a Linkedin Event
LinkedIn has made it very convenient for marketers to create events by simply clicking the event button located under the status box. Let’s quickly go through how to create an event on LinkedIn by clicking the Event button.
10.1 Create Your LinkedIn Event
Once you click on the Event button, a signup form will appear that will provide you with all the relevant fields to add a featured image, define the event type, set the times & date, add a description for the event, and add featured speaker names.
10.2 Provide Event Details
Once you have filled in all the details, the platform will auto-create a post to share the event on your feed.
You can visit the Official event creation guide.
LinkedIn Events FAQs
What are LinkedIn events?
A great feature to make setting up public or private events much quicker and easier than email. It helps you reach your attendees and audience, especially if you host virtual events, invite your connections, see who is attending, and make updates directly on the page. Think of it as a hub where you can build excitement leading up to your event.
Can I create an event on LinkedIn?
Yes, this feature is available to free and paid account members. The
setup is as frictionless as possible and available both on desktop and mobile.
How do I find events on LinkedIn?
Although it is not possible yet to search for a LinkedIn events list, the new discovery feature that was recently rolled out allows users to view personalized event recommendations in the “My Network” tab.
How do you use LinkedIn events?
On the desktop, you can find the feature on the home page left-hand panel under groups. On Mobile (Android), click on your thumbnail picture to access the panel. A LinkedIn events example includes brand-building events, conferences, talent branding, and targeted audience events.
How do I invite people to a LinkedIn event?
You can directly invite your LinkedIn connections, and you can also share the event with your network and copy the link to share it on social media, newsletter, or post about it on Twitter, Facebook, or elsewhere online.
How do you promote someone on LinkedIn?
Connect with your network via direct messages and encourage them to attend your event. Create a LinkedIn group for your event, engage with the attendees/ guest speakers and ask them to share it with their connections. You can also use LinkedIn’s sponsored content feature, a very effective tool to deliver your message to a particular target market.
How many people can attend a LinkedIn event?
You are not limited to a specific attendees number but to the invitation requests sent. Both organizers and attendees can send up to 1000 invitations per week. When this limit is reached, you’ll be alerted and prevented from sending any additional invitations.
How effective is LinkedIn to promote events
With studies showing that 80% of B2B leads from social media come from LinkedIn, plus being still relatively untouched with 722 million users compared to 2.7 billion monthly users on Facebook, LinkedIn offers an unsaturated territory for businesses.
How to share events on LinkedIn?
To promote your event beyond just a LinkedIn post, click the Share button on your event page. You can send the event link in a message to your network, embed it in your newsletter, or post it elsewhere online.
How to post events on LinkedIn
Choose Share in a post under the Share button on your LinkedIn Event page. Alternatively, you can send the event’s link in a message or copy it and share it on other platforms.
Conclusion
Being the largest professional social network online, LinkedIn offers a huge and relevant audience for event marketing. The sheer power of Linkedin events offers businesses the ability to freely distribute, measure, and conduct live events with great support from the platform itself.
As we exemplified above, our ten actionable strategies to promote events on LinkedIn provide you with the ideal audiences who will find value in the event and its speakers. In addition, this is a great chance to get your brand name trending amongst target markets who will find value in your products.
To learn more about promoting events on LinkedIn, talk to our team today. At Think Orion, we provide you with the ideal roadmap to promote & create LinkedIn events, establish a strong digital presence, develop robust SEO practices, create appealing content for your customers, and engage a worldwide audience who will find your brand invaluable.
