Online Event Planning With Social Media Tools

Planning an event becomes a lot simpler when you use social media tools. Social media, as we all know it, have changed the way individuals and companies plan, organize, implement, and promote their products and services. Here, I have shared with you a set of highly powerful social media tools that will help in successfully planning events of any size and type.

Tools for Invitation

One of the first steps of event planning is creating a tentative invitee list. The invitation can be designed with the help of a number of invitation tools which are currently available in the marketplace like Doodle.com, an efficient tool for finding common, free meeting times for a group of people. With the help of Doodle, you can overlap a number of schedules within a group of people who need to meet.

Organization Tools

After the invitation is out of the way, the next big thing that comes to play is organizing and managing an event. Organizers need to take care of a lot of key aspects such as registration, payment, communication, and promotion to make their events a great success! Now, managing small events may be easy but handling large scale events having a large audience volume may require additional staff and added resources. Under such circumstances, organizational tools can be of great help.

Wikis can help event planners organize multiple programs at different venues along with accommodating a large number of attendees. Google Maps is also a great organizational tool that enables people to locate the best of hotels near the event venue.

Online Marketing

Online marketing has become the buzzword today. Free social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. are being increasingly used to promote events to millions of online users.

You can create an "Events Page" on Facebook to start posting your information on you current and upcoming events along with the registration details. You can also explore the "invite your friends" feature to add more friends and colleagues to view and register for your event(s). Furthermore, you can continuously keep on updating people via live chat as and when your event lead time progresses to a close.

Live streaming is becoming more and more common these days. There are a number of free live streaming tools such as Ustream that can be used to market your products and events. For example, use Ustream to interview the speakers before the start of the event to create a pre-event buzz. You can even use Twitter or Facebook to chat with viewers to add more spice to your events.