Here are our top tips for effectively publicising your society or event:

1. First and foremost – consider the five ‘Ws’: who, what, where, when and why are you publicising? Discuss this with your committee – these should help you set your marketing plan. 
2. Planning is the crucial element to success. As soon as you’ve set the date of your event, work back at least 4 weeks in advance to the event date to set your publicity officer/team deadlines. Make sure you turn your rough marketing plan into a real action plan with dates and delegation.
3. Hold a mindmapping meeting with your committee where everyone has the chance to suggest publicity methods. Don’t hold back – write down as many different ideas as you can. You could write down associated words/themes/ideas, reflect on previous publicity or draw inspiration from designs/adverts you currently like.
4. Try to develop a style or ‘brand identity’ that all your communication/material will carry and create an identity for your campaign/event. Having a ‘brand’ could mean having a certain colour, logo or tagline for your society/committee, then making sure that you maintain this brand in all your publicity! This should make you more recognisable. Always keep your target audience in mind.
5. Consider how long it will take to create graphics, when to launch Facebook events, and how much notice you need to give to submit Activity Booking Forms.
6. Motivate and inspire your committee in order to achieve the goal together!
7. Most importantly – HAVE FUN! Running an event for your society is something to be excited about, and if you can show this then more of your members will be excited about it too!
    

The NTSU website is generally the first place that a student will interact with your society. It is where students can see the full list of societies, purchase their memberships and buy tickets for events. 

As a result, it's important that you use it to its full potential! Every society has its own space on the website, so you will want to keep the information about your group up-to-date and looking good to attract new members. It is especially important to let new members know where to go after they have paid their membership. Do you want newcomers to send your society an email after they join? Or should they follow your Instagram for the latest updates? Remember to let them know where to go next, and how to get there.

Make sure that all society members are responsible for updating your website. We have created video guidance and a PDF guide on how to use the website for running your society: 

We also have a quick template you can use as a guide if you want to update your society description. If you have any questions about the website, please contact our Comms team.

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are all great channels for society promotion. Setting them up with recognisable usernames (E.g. @NTSUExampleSoc) is a great place to start with society promotion. If you don’t have the time to commit to all three, just focus on doing one or two of them really well. Instagram is probably the best way to promote your society. Use the feed and stories to showcase what it is like to be in your society.

Tag @trentstudents on Facebook and Twitter, and @trentsu on Instagram so we can share your content through NTSU's main channels and help your society reach a wider audience.

You can also request to run a takeover of NTSU's Instagram channels to help you reach a wider audience. All you need to do is complete this form and a member of our Comms team will be in touch.

See our handy tip sheet for more advice on using social media for promoting your society.

There are a few things to consider when it comes to creating content for your social media channels.

All content should provide value:

Brian Millar, Co-founder of the Emotional Intelligence Agency, said: “Great online content is either funny, useful, beautiful or inspiring.” Bear these four things in mind and make sure everything you post provides value for your audience in some way.

It shouldn’t be all about sales:

It’s easy to get caught up in promoting your own posts but no-one likes a pushy salesperson. You should balance your promotional posts with non-sales content that your audience will find helpful. Find out how to do this effectively here.

Tailor it to each platform:

Different types of content perform best on each social media platform, so be sure to adapt your content for each one you’re posting on.  Facebook works best for educational or informative content e.g. blog posts, articles and videos, Twitter works best for real-time updates and announcements, and Instagram works best for behind the scenes, non-promotional posts featuring high quality images.

Posting regularly is important if you want to keep your audience engaged. How regularly depends on both the time you have available and the platform but here are some guidelines:

• Facebook – once a day. Any more than that limits the organic reach of your original post
• Twitter – 3x or more. The fast-paced nature of Twitter means you’ll need to post more frequently to be seen
• Instagram – once a day or every other day works best with Instagram’s algorithm
• Instagram Stories –  Try and post at least once a day. These are a great way to give members up to date society news and keep members engaged. 

The best time of day to post will differ depending on your specific audience. Experiment and use your analytics to see when works best. 

Engaging and building relationships with your audience is just as important as what you actually post. Make sure you reply to their comments and share other content where relevant.