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Marketing Your Meetup Group

Page history last edited by Jeremy 10 years, 9 months ago

* This guide is meant to be updated. If you have suggestions, please add them.

 

There's no single best way to promote your local meetup group.

 

The best thing to do is, of course, customer development to get to know your local entrepreneur population. You need to discover where they hang out, what blogs they read, and so forth by getting out of the building and talking to them.

 

That said, here are some tips:

 


Wiki

 

First of all, don't forget to add your meetup to our list on the wiki meetup page.

 

Event Mailing lists

 

Be sure to submit your event to any local mailing lists that promote events. Most notably, Startup Digest has lists all over the world and you should always submit to them.

 

University Outreach

 

Meetup groups benefit from a wide diversity of experience and opinions. This includes making sure there is a diverse age range. Universities, especially those with engineering and business programs, can be hotbeds for entrepreneurial activity and can be a welcome addition to your meetup. We have a few tips here on University Outreach.

 

Local Organizations

 

Local entrepreneur organizations are great places to go find people to talk to and invite to your next event.

 

Meetup.com

 

Meetup.com is very good at helping meetup.com members find your meetup. You just need to tag your group appropriately and provide a good description so people understand the purpose of your group.

 

Some suggested tags: 

 

Google Group

 

The Lean Startup Circle google group is available to promote online events, but please do not promote your local event on the google group!

 

The discussion group is an international list and your local meetup announcement will only apply to .001% of the mailing list so we do not allow posting of local events. 

 

Of course, you can make this a valuable marketing channel by making your event available for live streaming.

 

Social Media

 

Global Assets

 

The global social media assets such as twitter and facebook are available to help promote your events by tweeting and sharing. These assets are currently run by Tristan Kromer so just ask!

 

Please keep in mind, we are humans and are time constraint to how much time we can spend on twitter each day. If you're not getting the support you need, please consider volunteering.

 

Here are some of the assets available:

 

You can contact Tristan via email or simply tweet with "cc @LeanCircle" to make it easy to retweet.

 

Influencers

 

You can also cc: various Lean Startup leaders to try and get their attention and they might retweet something for you:

 

If you have more than a thousand followers on twitter or elsewhere and are willing to promote Lean Startup Circle events, please add yourself to the list above.

 

Trending Topics and Hashtags

 

You should also use the hashtags to get maximum distribution. Some common ones:

 

Creating Social Media Accounts 

 

By all means, create your own accounts on Twitter and elsewhere to promote your group. To promote your accounts you can use a variety of methods:

 

  • Name
    • We suggest you name your account @LeanCircle[City Initials] e.g. @LeanCircleNY or @LeanCircleLA
    • @LeanStartupCircle is too long and gets in the way or retweets and mentions. 
  • Logo and Branding
  • Content
    • There are a number of tools that can help pace your social media messages and fill up content. We suggest using automated tools when possible to save your time for more active needs such as customer development with your group.
    • Here are some tools:
      • IFTTT.com
        • IFTTT automates a lot of content generation. For example, you can set up a feed from the LeanStartupCircle Google Group, various bloggers you respect, and so forth to provide a steady stream of content.
        • You can link your Twitter feed to facebook or vice versa with no additional effort.
        • You can also set up auto-replies and so forth when people start following you.
        • There is a list of recipes that the main Lean Startup Circle uses. If you create new ones that other Lean Startup Circles may find useful, please let us know.
      • Timely.is, bufferapp.com, hootsuite.com
        • These tools help you put articles into a queue so they'll be spaced out over days instead of minutes. This way you can maintain a constant social media presence while not distracting yourself constantly. 
      • Tweetadder.com
        • Tweetadder can be used for evil spammy purposes but it can also be used with more subtly to enhance your marketing message. We recommend that later, for example:
          • It can automatically follow users on twitter which tweet about certain topics (such as #leanstartup) and in your area to make them aware of your account.
          • It can set up auto replies. We strongly suggest auto-replies be courteous and/or funny. A bad message example would be, "Make sure to like my page on facebook..."
          • It can automatically retweet certain accounts or hashtags. For example, @leancircle automatically retweets @ericries when he uses the hashtag #leanstartup.
        • If you would like to use this tool, we can set your account up with our global Tweetadder account. Please contact us

 

If you'd prefer not to create your own accounts, please consider volunteering to help with the global group's social media presence.

 

Blogging

 

There is a Lean Startup Circle group blog which we invite anyone with a story to post on. This is a great way to announce your group, and also to let people know how you're going about applying lean startup to itself. Please contact us to get an account.

 

You can also invite your members to post on the group account and let the world know about your lean startup stories. It brings attention to your group and helps everyone learn. We promote all the stories, so it's a good way to get some extra links back to your own blog and project as well as for the group.

 

Guidelines are not yet been established, but it's pretty low key.

 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

 

We are working to tie all the digital assets together to create a strong SEO presence and will eventually move this wiki to leanstartupcircle.com. Making sure that you use a leanstartupcircle.com subdomain for your meetup group and even blogging on blog.leanstartupcircle.com is part of that. Every bit helps.

 

In addition, your help to update and fill out this wiki is essential to these efforts, so please pick a page and contribute some content.

 

If you are familiar with SEO and would like to help with our efforts, please volunteer.

 


 

Additional Links

 

 

Questions? Contact us!   

 

 

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