Dance Event Promotion is Hard, DanceDeets makes it Easy
Event promotion gets more challenging every year.
Event promotion gets more challenging every year.
Originally, it was reliant on the strength of your network as a promoter: the word-of-mouth network you can reach, your distribution of flyers to all the right spots, the phone contact lists you can text blast, and even the Facebook friends you can invite to events. Things change with the times, and keeping up with the changes can be more difficult than it should be.
Promoting outside the core dance scene is difficult
Most event organizers and promoters promote to everyone they know, and ask their friends to do the same. Unfortunately, dancers know mostly dancers, and as a community we do a horrible job of reaching outside ourselves. We invite our friends, post on our friends’ walls, but even our friends’ friends…are just our own friends! Fundamentally, it’s hard to reach out to the dancers we don’t know yet:
The recently-moved dancer, who unfortunately doesn’t know any dancers in his or her new city. Japanese dancers are moving to English-speaking cities all the time to learn English, but rarely know anyone in the dance scene there. I moved to Paris for work years ago, but found it really difficult to find the dance scene outside of the dance studios out there!
The vacationing dancer, on a trip with his/her family, or exploring the world solo. Disconnected, often in town for a few days or a week, there’s no time to build relationships.
Other dance communities. In many cities, the bboy scene is totally different from the hiphop or house scene. Or the street-jazz / hiphop-choreo community is totally different from the freestyle street dance community. People end up joining the scene their friends are in, and it might take years for them to discover where they really fit and feel comfortable in this dance culture.
The dance fan. They’d never call themselves a dancer, but they saw and loved ABDC or Step Up 3D (seeing a dance battle in 3D!), and want to follow their favorite dancers or crews. Or just watch some real dancing! (How many times have you met a random person who said they’d love to watch a dance show or battle?) They rarely go to dance events, but when they decide to go and start looking, they don’t know where to look!
DanceDeets can reach all these people for you. Dancers who travel, know to use DanceDeets. Dancers who move, do the same. This gives them an immediate way to connect up with the dance scene, wherever they are, and discover your events. Combined with DanceDeets’ incredible use of Google to reach the casual internet searcher, helps us reach and bring those people to your dance events…even if you don’t (yet!) have the personal connections to them!
Social networks keep changing the rules on us
Originally MySpace, then Facebook, and now Instagram and Snapchat! Japan’s on Twitter, China’s on WeChat, of course there’s a smattering of platforms like Tumblr, Weblio, SquareSpace, and more. As event promoters, we’re constantly trying to keep current, figuring out ways to take advantage all these platforms, even as they change out from under us.
But the rules keep changing…
MySpace died from spam, and now Facebook is fighting the spam wars too. And unfortunately, while you may have 5,000 dance friends, and as of 2016 Facebook started limiting the number of people you can invite to your event to 500 or less. So your painstakingly built list of contacts, can be ruined in an instant due to these simple rule changes by Facebook.
Or in response to scary news about Facebook privacy issues, Facebook the default to “private” for events, and good luck noticing how to fix it before it’s too late! Promoters are accidentally creating private Facebook events (that are visible only to their friends), and wondering why their outreach isn’t as large as they used to be! From the rough numbers we’ve collected, more than 10% of events are accidentally private, and that can cost you more than half of your attendance!
DanceDeets is a dance platform, by dancers, for dancers. We need to start building our own social distribution, instead of relying on the Facebooks and big companies to support us. DanceDeets can tell you about common problems with your events (that Facebook doesn’t mention!) And while DanceDeets doesn’t yet have everything an event promoter needs (so keep on doing what you’re doing!), it offers a great platform for event distribution, that will only get better with time.
It’s hard to be everywhere, but DanceDeets helps
It’s no longer enough to have a flyer and a facebook event. People find stuff through Twitter, through searching on Google, and a variety of platforms. It takes time and energy to be everywhere, and DanceDeets can help: We promote your event on our website, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and really anywhere else that we’re able to. So no matter where people are searching, they’ll be able to find your event. And as Instagram, SnapChat, or WeChat get popular for event promotion, we’ll try to figure out a solution for you there too!