GUEST POST: Yair Scher is Marketing Director for Evento Social Promotion. Evento is a cloud-based solution for event organizers and rights-holders to maximize the value of their social media assets. 

Many sports organizations use social media because they understand that they “must be present in the social media”. They aren’t mistaken of course, but when social presence is a must for everyone, sports organizations have to take extra steps in order to drive event sales.

Sports events are social, fans go to events with their friends, sharing the experience before, during and after the event is part of the fun. So connecting fans’ social experience from events and promoting them over social media seems like a no brainer. However this seemingly basic concept isn’t fully implemented yet by sports social media managers. Here are 5 tips of how to use social to drive event sales:

1.     Create Social Stickiness

Fans and potential ticket buyers perceive information from social media as any other kind of information. There’s nothing special about it anymore. Social media interaction must be leveraged towards recurring consumption of the information by the fans and encouraging them to get constantly updated. Otherwise, communicating your event over social media is not so different than display ads or email marketing. Make sure your fans have a reason to get updated again and again.

2.     Empower your fans

Fans like to feel special and that they are more than just consumers. You can even say that they want to be part of the event. Give them some means in which they can influence the event; chose the pre-game music, provide  2 options for half-time entertainment, or even ask them what would be there preferred special food offer – hot dog or hamburger?

3.     Identify social brand ambassadors

There will always be different levels of engaging fans. Some will just click “attending” or buy a ticket, but some will tweet, post, like and share their excitement for the upcoming events. The latter are your brand ambassadors and you want to nurture their social media activity.

4.     Reward and incentivize social sharing

Fans can be encouraged to invite friends, share the event’s information and post their event related activity. There are many ways to incentivize these activities: free extra tickets, upgrading seats, reward them with free merchandize food and drinks. The costs of these rewards are a very good investment in social promotion.

5.     Use Real-Time Analytics

Social monitoring tools are very helpful for evaluating social trends, identifying brand ambassadors and extracting actionable data. Which links drove the most traffic to your page and which users posted your event and invited their friends? Using free online tools and specialized social promotion services enable you to maximize your social marketing efforts and drive more sales.