Effective Social Media Campaigns for Tech Events

We’ve managed $100k+ ad budgets promoting online and in-person events and here’s what we’ve learned: 1. Timing matters. The majority of ticket sales or registrations happen in the weeks leading up to the event. We account for this by allocating the majority of the spend closer to the day of the event. 2. Social proof converts. For one client, we searched LinkedIn for anyone who posted about the event after the fact and ranked them by engagement. We then promoted those posts as thought leader ads in anticipation of the next event. 3. Promote transparency. If you are at liberty to do so, why not give away the attendee list? If you have a high value audience and have your targeting dialed in, try a campaign where you gate the attendee list. We’ve seen this tactic promote great conversations that directly lead to ticket sales. 4. Ads that feature as many speakers as possible tend to perform the best. Generally we see ads with faces perform well, so try combining all the speakers into one post. You can then split those ads up into individual speaker ads, use them in carousels, etc. Above all, we’ve learned that preparation is key to promoting these events. For one client, we put together a schedule of ads that would go out as we got closer to the day of the event. This included “countdown” ads where we’d say “the event is 1 month out!” etc. as we built a sense of urgency. Because we put together this plan we were able to get creative requests to our designers early. We had all the creatives ready to go months out from the event and had all the campaigns built and scheduled so that they would pause and activate as the countdown got closer. We’re always testing new strategies to promote these events and it’s impossible to fit all of our experiments into one post. For example, LinkedIn has built in event ads which allow people to register for a LinkedIn event directly from the ad. The key to improving performance for that ad unit is to build up as many organic registrations as possible. Since you can see how many people registered directly on the ad, we’ve seen that a higher number of organic registrations directly impacts the conversion rate on the paid side. Interested in hearing more about how we promote events via ads? Feel free to reach out. We have a ton more ideas we’re looking to test. 🧑🔬

Empty rooms aren’t caused by bad events, they’re caused by bad distribution. You can host the most compelling community meetup, Founder Institute session, or startup pitch night (in my work in public affairs, I see City Events where the community should turn out in droves), and still get crickets; not because people don’t care, but because they never even saw your invite. Gmail buries newsletters, Facebook throttles reach, LinkedIn quietly downranks your second post. If you think one email blast is enough, you’re running a wishful thinking experiment, not an event. If you aren’t everywhere, you’re nowhere. That means… ✅ One anchor hub – Have a single authoritative listing (your FI registration page or a Company Page.). Everything else points there. ✅ Mirror everywhere – Publish the same event on Eventbrite, Meetup, Luma, LinkedIn Events, Facebook Events. People search those platforms. ✅ Direct Invites – Stop ignoring the Invite button. On LinkedIn and Facebook, you get free monthly invites. Use all of them. This is how you scale personal invitations without writing 400 messages. ✅ Social post strategy – Don’t post once and call it done. Post weekly. Tag your speakers. Tag in the comments. Prime the algorithm (engage on others’ content first). Rally your team to Like/Comment within the first hour. ✅ Email = reinforcement, not lifeline – Assume only 30% see your email. Use it to boost other channels, not as your sole driver. ✅ Multi-channel = omnichannel – The founder you hope attends might ignore newsletters but live on Meetup. Your sponsor might only check LinkedIn. Students may find you on TikTok. Distribution is the job. This isn’t “more work,” it’s how events fill. When people see momentum across multiple channels, trust builds, rooms fill, and sponsors notice. 👉 Stop hoping. Start distributing. Help me here and add what works well for you. Do you lean heavier on Eventbrite SEO, direct invites, or rallying your team for social engagement?

The most exciting project I worked on in 2023 was boosting registrations for an event. Here is what we did: Context: 5 weeks before the event. Message We benchmarked the event against the competition. We diversified the message, in this case, to move from education to networking and entertainment. Early bird canning This event overdid early birds. Our recommendation was to start marketing price increases instead of price reductions. Inverse psychology that, while stimulating FOMO, contributes to the overall perception of the event. Destination Leverage The destination was under-leveraged. We crafted email and social messages to showcase what the destination offered to stimulate last-minute sign-ups. Reg Software In most cases, reg is not optimized. Making sure every single option to sell better is turned on is paramount. We set up remarketing pixels and group codes. Social We coordinated a campaign to get the whole team to share the event on LinkedIn to boost last-minute peer pressure. LinkedIn is often ignored and it has a major impact on last minute conversions. Ambassador tech We recommended using referral platforms such as InGo, Snoball, or GleanIn. These platforms can be very different in their impact, and some integrate better with specific software. We projected a 30% increase in reg based on a proper implementation. Cart abandonment We found hundreds of abandoned carts and created a sales and email strategy to reach this audience. Understanding why they are not committing or proposing a discount code does wonders. Sources We optimized higher sources of conversions. In this case, email. We devised an email campaign with different levers to pull (community, team discount opportunity, destination showcase). This was key to diversifying the message. We turned this around in two weeks. Objective: achieved. Steal these tactics for your event.