* 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:
First of all, don't forget to add your meetup to our list on the wiki meetup page.
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.
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 entrepreneur organizations are great places to go find people to talk to and invite to your next event.
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:
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.
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.
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.
You should also use the hashtags to get maximum distribution. Some common ones:
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:
If you'd prefer not to create your own accounts, please consider volunteering to help with the global group's social media presence.
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.
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.
Questions? Contact us!