Social media is a very inexpensive way of building momentum for your event. It’s also a great way to build awareness and a year-round channel for maker events and opportunities in your area. You will also immediately begin to assemble an audience that will do the work of promoting your fun and interesting event for you.
How can you use social media?
Use social media to share news about your local maker community. Cover beekeepers, the local biofuels collective and the Arduino users group. The diversity of content will immediately reinforce your public’s understanding about what a maker and a Maker Faire is—and demonstrate that your “mini” Faire is the real thing!
Give updates on the development of your Faire. Did you just confirm some famous kite-maker for a demo? How did the maker open house go last night? Tweet it!
Write teasers for every blog post you publish. You spent time crafting that blog post, so drive traffic to it with a clever or intriguing Tweet or Facebook post.
Promote ticket sales. Push the earlybird deadline, your affiliate programs with the local school district, ticket giveaway campaigns, discount codes—share information about a market opportunity and a means for taking action (a link to your ticket sale site!).
Start your social media presence as soon as you have a confirmed license agreement. The primary channels at this point are Facebook and Twitter.
You have to have a personal identity to create a page on Facebook. (Do not try and set up the event an individual.) Facebook has the broadest reach of any of the social networks, so plan to spend time here.
Google+
Like Facebook, you need to have a personal identity to create a page on Google+. Do not try and make the event a person; you must create a page.
Tweets are short: 140 characters maximum, likely including a link to some explanatory content. Twitter handles are short versions of your name, with an “@” sign in front of it. For example, the East Bay Mini Maker Faire Twitter handle is @ebmakerfaire.
Twitter can seem like the latest way to waste time (since Facebook), but before you discount Twitter, you should understand the many advantages of using Twitter.
Hashtags can introduce you to makers that you did not know. “Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets… You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.” The hashtag for Maker Faire is #makerfaire.
Hashtags are especially useful around time-sensitive events (“trending topics”). For example: you’re watching the President give the State of the Union Address. In real-time, you can read immediate reactions to the Address by searching for Tweets with the hashtag #SOTU (State of the Union). (It’s useful to use a free third-party application like Hootsuite to search hashtags.)
As you read that real-time community “news” stream, you will notice interesting people or organizations tweeting that you will want to “follow.” This is a good way of finding out about Makers and community groups that you were not yet aware of and—if you tweet and also use that hashtag—lets them know about you. This begins to build your Twitter identity.
The same thing happens with #makerfaire. People will use your handle (e.g. @ebmakerfaire) and #makerfaire before, during, and after your event.
Twitter is an incredible tool for sharing real-time updates just before and during your event. Announce when time-sensitive demos and workshops or performances are about to begin. Tweet when a parking lot is full. Tweet to promote under populated or hidden areas or super cool maker exhibits.
HINT: You can set up your Tweets to automatically post to Facebook. This allows you to share information in both worlds to both users at the same time. The downside? Links in your Tweet feed will not automatically expand when they post to Facebook, so your Facebook posts will be less visual. And Facebook users often get confused by Twitter conventions and symbols.