Why Your Own Posts Reach the Fewest People
An event account posting to its own followers reaches people who already know the event. A speaker posting to their network reaches people who trust the speaker and have never heard of the event. The second post is worth more than the first, and there are forty of them per conference if you make them easy.
The maths of borrowed audiences
Twenty speakers with two thousand connections each is forty thousand people, most of whom overlap with your target audience and none of whom follow your event page. Ten sponsors and thirty exhibitors add their company pages. The only cost is making the post a single tap.
Why kits fail
A folder of banners and a doc of suggested captions is homework. The speaker has to find the right file, crop it, write the post and paste a link. Most never do. A page that already shows their banner with their name, a prepared caption and a share button turns homework into a tap.
Why you need per-person links
If every post carries the same link you learn nothing. If every share mints its own link you learn which speaker, which sponsor and which channel actually sent people to the ticket page, and you can thank them, renew them or drop them next year.
The Promotion Timeline
- Contract signing: sponsors and exhibitors Send sponsor and exhibitor banners the week the contract is signed. Their logo, tier and booth number are known; they are motivated; the event is months away, which is when early-bird sales need help.
- Lineup announcement: speakers, wave one The day the programme goes public, every speaker gets a personal link to a banner with their session title. Ask for the post on the announcement day so the feed shows a wave, not a trickle.
- Registration confirmation: attendees Put an I'm attending widget on the confirmation page. The moment of purchase is the peak of enthusiasm and the only moment you have the attendee's attention for free.
- Two weeks out: the second speaker post Links do not expire, so a reminder email with the same link produces a second post. Change the suggested caption to the countdown angle.
- Week of the event: sponsors and exhibitors again Visit us at booth B12 is a different post from We are exhibiting. Same link, new caption.
- After the event: archive, keep counting Archive the campaign so nobody generates a stale banner, and let late clicks and conversions from posts already out there finish the report.
What Goes on the Banner
A personalized banner has three jobs: identify the person, identify the event, and give the reader a reason to click. Everything else is decoration.
Person first
Name, face and role are what the reader's feed algorithm and the reader's eye both react to. A speaker's headshot in the banner outperforms the event logo by a wide margin.
Event second
Name, date and city or online. Not the tagline, not the sponsor wall; those belong on the event page.
Reason to click third
The session title for a speaker, the booth number for an exhibitor, the tier for a sponsor. That is the personalized part and the reason the post gets read as news rather than as an ad.
Sizes
Portrait 1080 x 1350 and square 1080 x 1080 for LinkedIn and Instagram feeds; 1080 x 1920 for stories; 1200 x 627 only where a landscape link preview is needed. Design two, offer both.
How to Measure It
There are three numbers, and only one of them is worth reporting to a budget holder.
Shares are intent
A share is counted when the share sheet opens. No tool can see whether the post was completed inside a phone's share sheet; that is a privacy boundary, not a gap. Treat share counts as an activity metric.
Clicks are the truth
Every share carries its own link; every click on it is recorded independently. Filter out LinkedIn's and Facebook's link crawlers and the corporate security scanners that hit every posted URL, or your click count is fiction.
Conversions need a pixel on your page
Registrations and ticket sales can be attributed to the person who shared when a small script runs on your own confirmation page and reports the order. If checkout completes on a ticketing platform's domain, you get clicks, not sales, and you should say so in the report.
Put the Plan Into Practice
Frequently Asked Questions
Sponsors and exhibitors at contract signing, months out; speakers at lineup announcement; attendees at the moment of registration; a second speaker wave two weeks before the event.