Your event’s profile is the anchor for your Instagram marketing. It’s a snapshot of your brand, a glimpse at your “post portfolio,” and a high-level visual and textual description of who you are. Users navigate to your profile when they want to learn what your event is – or commit to attending. Yet this valuable space in your event’s profile has room for just one URL and a measly 150-character bio. And there’s another wrinkle: To maximise your reach, your profile needs to be discoverable by people searching on Instagram. 

Want to verify that your account is managed by your event? 

The blue checkmark verification icon next to your Instagram username is elusive. Instagram doesn’t publicly reveal how verification is assigned – you can’t request it or pay for it. The most direct route to becoming a verified Instagram account is to simply grow your followers – bigger accounts tend to become verified.

For creators with multiple events and lots to say, it’s vital your team distills the information here down to its essentials: 

• Concise, engaging copy 
• A clear image 
• Correct URL 
• Searchable keywords 
• Relevant hashtags 

The most unique aspect of Instagram is that it’s a visual-first platform. Capturing attention through visual assets will be part of any event’s major success. Publishing consistent, quality social media content throughout the year can be challenging for event creators. You know to announce lineups and onsale dates, but on a daily basis, your team needs to  tell a much bigger story. 

If posts showcase the best of your event, stories record what’s happening right now. String together snapshots and short (10-second) videos, and you create an ephemeral story that lasts for only 24 hours. 

With more than 300 million daily active users, Instagram Stories are the future of the platform. As an event creator, this ephemeral posting method has strategic applications: 

• Testing content: Stories are ideal for testing new tactics and types of content in a temporary environment. 
• Teasing announcements: Before artist or speaker announcements, tease the reveal with hints, such as the speaker’s initials or a blurred picture that your followers have to decipher. 
• Inspiring FOMO: Because the posts disappear, showcasing insider info, behind the scenes content, or flash sale promotions here will incite FOMO (fear of missing out). 

Best of all, as an event creator, you can convert viewers into attendees by: 

• Adding links to your ticketing page: Once you have 10,000 followers, your team can add clickable links to your stories (something you can’t do with traditional Instagram posts). Your team shouldn’t miss this opportunity to link to your ticketing page – once a week at minimum. 
• Converting your most successful stories into sponsored ads: If your Instagram account is a business account (more on this below), you can use Stories ads to connect directly to your ticketing page. 

The Stories feature is a darling of Instagram, and the platform is putting more and more emphasis on it, including the addition of an inline story promotion in user feeds and the ability for creators to feature story highlights on profile pages. As an event creator, if your team doesn’t start taking advantage of this feature soon, you’ll miss out. 

Why it pays to be a business on Instagram 

Instagram began to offer creators the ability to update to business profile status for free in 2016. Now, there are 25M active business profiles on Instagram and a third of the most viewed stories come from businesses.

More importantly, two-thirds of visitors to business profiles come from users who don’t yet follow that profile. That’s a lot of potential event-goers being exposed to your brand. And business profiles have other advantages, too: 

• Metrics: Business profiles have access to metrics that general users don’t, including insight on both posts and stories, so you can see the numbers on your reach, impressions, replies, and exits. 
• Contact: Business profiles get a “Contact” button on the bio, making it easier for followers to get in touch.
• Easy ad creation: Businesses can convert posts and stories into ads or create ads from scratch with built-in tools that used to only be available via Facebook. 
• Tagability: Business can tag their products in a post once they create a product through Facebook. For events, this means you can tag your merch, vendors, or other event swag in Instagram posts for a direct line to revenue. 

Instagram’s advertising M.O. is to keep the experience inline and authentic. From sponsored posts in user feeds to immersive, full-screen ads within stories, the user’s viewing experience is consistent and fluid. 

Instagram is a marketing ecosystem, and influencers are at the top of the food chain. They range from paid brand ambassadors with enormous social clout to micro-influencers – your everyday fans who just happen to have a dedicated base of followers. And that base could soon be following your event as well. 

But establishing a relationship with an influencer is not just another way to broaden your reach. All Instagram roads should ultimately lead to ticket sales. Your team should work with influencers whose followers match your target market in terms of subject matter, demographics, and geographical location. 

Here are some ideas for influencer campaigns: 

• Launch influencer campaigns around your ticket on-sale dates.
• Offer influencers free tickets to your event to share their experience online. 
• Let an influencer do an “Instagram takeover” of your account on Instagram Stories, during which they’ll encourage their fans to follow your account to follow along. 
• Arm influencers with promo codes they can share with their fanbase (this is an especially effective tool to use with local tastemakers or micro influencers, who’ll love to reward fans with the perk). 

Just be sure your team has made the terms of your relationship clear before the promotion begins – they can learn more in this post.

Tools for building an influencer campaign 

Managing an entire influencer marketing campaign can be overwhelming for even the most savvy events team. To make their efforts more efficient, have a member of your team investigate these tech tools to find and manage your influencer program: 

• SocialRank identifies potential influential Instagram accounts within your existing audience based on things like location, follower numbers, and engagement.
• Scrunch helps your team find influencers based on topics and keywords, then connects you to these people. 
• SocialLadder builds a team of brand ambassadors from within your event’s fan base and arms them with vanity promo codes. 
• Verve motivates fans to sell tickets for you with an automated reward system and coaching. 

Instagram algorithms dictate where and when posts show up in feeds. Those that get the most engagement – likes, comments, video views, direct message (DM) shares, saved story views, and live video views – rise higher. You’ll often see creators use language like this: “Tag a friend for a chance to win tickets to our event.” 

Social media giveaways work because they’re engaging. With every new user tagged, you get an extra set of eyeballs on your post.