A Complete Guide for How to Promote a Concert on Social Media

Around 85% of concertgoers find out about events online, with 66% of fans claiming that they like learning about upcoming concerts on social media platforms. If we narrow the pool even more, more than half of US concertgoers discover new events on one of Meta’s platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp), making it the number one source for digital discovery. So the question isn’t whether or not you should be using social media to advertise your events; it’s about how to promote a concert on social media.

How to Promote a Concert on Social Media

Whether you’ve been attached to social media since MySpace was a thing or are relatively new to the phenomenon, social media channels offer an incredible opportunity to advertise your upcoming events.

Determining how to promote a concert on social media goes hand in hand with your other marketing campaigns. It relies on having a deep understanding of the people who are most likely to buy tickets to a specific event. Different platforms come with different niches and nuances, so you have to have a solid strategy before posting.

Why Do I Need a Plan for Social Media Ad Campaigns?

Without a strategy, you might fall into the trap of posting for the sake of posting. All of your posts should have intention behind them and should work to help you achieve your primary goal. In this case, the goal is to increase event attendance.

Creating a strategy for how to promote a concert on social media will ensure that you use the right tools to get the kind of exposure you’re looking for. Plus, you’re busy enough as it is–you want to make sure the time you dedicate to social media promotion is as effective as it possibly can be.

Social Media Ad Campaign Checklist

Here are the most important things to consider when determining how to promote a concert on social media.

How Will You Reach Your Target Audience on Social Media?

The good news is that you don’t necessarily need to establish a presence on every single social media channel. You can pick a couple that you believe will give you the greatest chance of reaching your target audience.

According to Sprout Social, there are some specific demographics for each social media platform that can help you with this:

• Facebook: 2.91 billion monthly active users, with most users between 25-34 years old
• Instagram: 2 billion monthly active users, with most users between 18-34 years old
• YouTube: over 2 billion monthly active users, with most users between 15-35 years old
• TikTok: 1 billion monthly active users, with most users between 10-19 years old
• Twitter: 211 million daily active users, with most users between 18-29 years old
• LinkedIn: 810 million monthly active users, with most users between 25-34 years old (although LinkedIn is widely recognized as a B2B social networking platform)
• Pinterest: 431 million monthly active users, with most users between 50-64 years old
• Snapchat: 319 million monthly active users, with most users between 15-25 years old 

So, if you have a headliner who would primarily appeal to millennials, you’d likely want to concentrate your social media efforts on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. If you were promoting an event to a Gen Z audience, you’d want to focus on TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube.

Of course, these aren’t hard and fast rules, but understanding the primary demographics for the users on each channel will help you decide which platforms you want to establish a presence on.

Related: What to Look For in Music Promoter Tools

What’s Your Budget?

After you decide which social media channels you’ll invest the most time and resources in, the next part of figuring out how how to promote a concert on social media is determining how much of your marketing budget you can allocate to these social media campaigns. If you want to promote posts, you’ll have to invest a bit to help your content get discovered by the right people.

In some cases, you may want to stick to organic discovery through curated content and hashtags. Especially if you’re going to promote your event on TikTok, where you’re looking at a minimum of $6000 for in-feed advertisements alone, strategic unpaid promotion allows you to put those funds somewhere else. Don’t worry, Facebook and Instagram are significantly more affordable.

What Additional Demographics Comprise Your Target Audience?

The more you understand your target audience, the more specific you’ll be able to get with your social media strategy. When it comes to figuring out how to promote a concert on social media, it’s beneficial to create a few customer personas for each event or artist. Your customer personas should include details such as their:

• Job title
• Age
• Gender
• Salary/income
• Location
• Interests and hobbies
• Favorite social media platforms

These details can help you decide on what kind of content to post and spend on, as well as what kind of information or angle to focus on.

How Often Will You Post?

How often you post will depend on your platform, but it’s essential that you only post when you have something worthy of sharing with your followers. In short: don’t post just to say you posted. It’s much better to post incredible content every few days than to post mediocre content every day. The amazing content will keep your followers engaged; the mediocre content will get you unfollowed.

Some promoters find it helpful to create a social media calendar to map out when to post their generated content. A calendar also helps ensure consistency across all of your social media channels.

What Will You Post?

That’s up to you! Whatever you post should be interesting and add value to your target customers’ lives—you need them to stop scrolling and engage with your content. You can stick to a theme or mix it up to keep your feed exciting.

For an upcoming concert, you may want to post video snippets from the artists’ previous performances or interviews, graphics with the event details, and stills of fans screaming in the crowd or wearing the artist’s merch.

It’s crucial to use every posting method available to you on a given platform. For example, on Instagram, you can post to your feed, post to your story, and create reels. If you’re on that social channel, you should be crafting content for all three.

Related: Easing Promoter’s Workloads with Event Promotion Tools

How to Increase Visibility

Now that you’ve put your strategy together, it’s time to do everything you can to get your posts discovered by your target audience members. Part of determining how to promote a concert on social media is ensuring that people learn about your event while scrolling.

Get Creative With Your Posts

You can do so much with your posts, no matter which platform you’re using to get your message out. You should attract the right attention as long as you’re creating engaging content and you aren’t over-posting. Some tricks you can try include:

• Using the “countdown sticker” on Instagram Stories to remind people when tickets go on sale or generate a buzz about the concert
• Posting teaser trailers for the event
• Giving a sneak peek of behind-the-scenes action with the artist
• Designing a custom augmented reality (AR) filter on Instagram or Snapchat
• Hosting “Live” events where fans can ask the artist questions
• Reposting content shared by your followers
• Saving event highlights to your Instagram Story highlights
• Teaming up with influencers or other popular artists
• Creating a unique event hashtag for fans to use when they post about the event

And speaking of hashtags, you’ll want to do some hashtag research to determine which hashtags you should add to your posts to make them more discoverable to your target audience.

Make an Event Page

If you’re establishing your presence on Facebook, you’ll want to create an event page for your concert. Facebook events are an incredible tool and make it ridiculously easy to share concert details with others.

Setting up a Facebook event page enables users to:

• Discover your event when looking through Facebook’s event catalog to find something to do
• Find important information about the event (date, time, location, etc.)
• Respond to posts and interact with content
• Directly message you with any questions they have
• Share it with their friends with the click of a button

Host a Contest

Everyone loves free stuff, and an easy way to create hype for your event is to host a contest on one of your social media platforms. You can decide how people enter the contest and what prizes to give away, but it’s best for the entries to generate engagement.

For example, many contests on Instagram ask users to follow the account and tag a friend in the comments. By having them tag their friends, more people will see your content and (hopefully) follow you and tag some of their friends in return.

All you have to do is choose a winner at random and deliver the prize, whether it’s artist merchandise or free tickets to the event.

Organize Your Social Media Marketing Efforts

Staying on top of your social media posts can be tricky, even if you know exactly how to promote a concert on social media. The first step is having a solid grasp on what’s happening at your venue and when it’s happening, as well as knowing exactly where your budget stands as you plan to invest resources in your marketing campaign.

Prism is an elite software that takes music event management to the next level. Our interactive calendar, paired with our numerous other features, keeps you organized and makes planning out your social media campaigns easy. Schedule your demo today to see what Prism can do for you.