Schedule Tweets and create a Facebook event associated with your fan page to drive even more traffic to this event.

Promoting Virtual Events via Twitter

Twitter is a fast moving site. Updates get quickly buried in people's feed (depending on how many people they follow) so posting frequency can be a little higher on this medium. I recommend an average of 1-2 posts per day about any given topic / event. You could do one in the morning and one in the afternoon, which would capture the two busier times in the day. If you feel that your followers would give you some leeway on posting often, you could even add one evening Tweet but I'll leave that for you to decide.

If you don't want to be sitting at your computer or on Twitter this frequently, consider using a tool to pre-schedule your updates. I use Hootsuite.com to preschedule updates when I know that I won't be at my computer or able to update but when I have a message that I need to share. You can use their Publisher interface to schedule your updates leading up to the event and for the follow-up post-event as well.

Updates can vary but I do recommend incorporating Tweets that share:

1. An announcement about the event with a link to the sign up page

2. Tips related to the event with an invitation to learn more at the free event

3. Information about your guest speakers and be sure to @ reply them in the Tweet also

4. Time sensitivity around deadlines to sign up for free events (1 week left, 1 day left, 1 hour left)

5. During the event updates - perhaps summarize the good points your guest speaker is making

6. Post-event follow-up with an invitation to get the recording

Promoting Virtual Events on Facebook

Facebook is a little different than Twitter. While on Twitter you can get away with 3-4 posts per day, you may not be able to get away with that on Facebook. The average Facebook user logs in to Facebook, lands on the feed screen and they scroll down until they get to the last set of updates they've read. This means that if you post the same post a few times in a day, they'll see the message over and over again and may get annoyed and just turn off your updates.

With Facebook, you want to post less frequently and you definitely don't want to spam the same link or the same content multiple times per day. I usually recommend posting 2-3 times per week about your upcoming event.

Let's say you have four weeks of lead time and you want to post twice per week. Updates could include:

1. Announcement of event with details on how people can register

2. Introduction of speaker / guest and why people should know who they are

3. A tip or tidbit of information with an invitation to learn more at the event

4. An update on how many people have registered so far and an invite to attend

5. One week left to register update with link to event page

6. Morning of update with a "still time to register" update

7. Update post-event with a summary of how things went and an invite to sign up for recording

8. A recording is ready for download/purchase update post-event