Do you plan to promote your B2B company’s holiday party through social media this year? Does your social media marketing strategy aim focus on lead generation? Are you inviting current, future or potential clients to your big bash? Then buckle up team, you have an awesome opportunity to optimize your event marketing strategy with social media!

5 ideas to help with your event planning using social media:

1. Create online invitations (you can also send print ones if you like to keep it traditional) that include links to your social sites. Incorporate a call-to-action above the links that encourages your guests to follow your social networks and join in on the holiday fun leading up to the event.

2. Blog about it on your company page and share through social media. Invite media or industry bloggers to the event to get more press afterwards. Evoke a sense of anticipation and urgency in your expected guests by giving clues to a special guest or party surprise via your blog and social media.

3. Engage your fans leading up to the event through social media. Even if they are not invited or cannot attend the event you can still include them in the festivities. You could create an advent calendar in Wildfire leading up to the big day with industry tips or holiday haikus written by employees. Allow fans an opportunity to be a part of the experience by a polling fans on Facebook for decor theme ideas. Creativity is key!

4. Take photos of party attendees and post an album to Facebook after the event. Set your album tagging preferences to fans only. Announce via your social networks that you have posted the album and let fans tag their pictures. You will encourage attendees to “like” you on Facebook in order to tag photos. It is likely that if they attended your holiday party, they will have no qualms with liking your brand on Facebook and hearing more from your company after the event.

5. Create an event hashtag that is relevant to your brand and live tweet from the holiday party. Play with your target keyphrases when crafting creative messaging. A party is a good time for many to discuss the event via their social networks and share their experiences with their followers. Having a dedicated hashtag can help you capture, organize and follow-up with the conversation during and afterward. You can even include an event tweet digest as part of your party re-cap blog post!

Do you have more ideas for how to promote your holiday party through social media? Share them with GPO through Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Happy Holidays!

April Fool’s Days of the past were all about classic pranks, like gluing a quarter to the ground on a busy street corner.

But April Fool’s Day seems to have become less about physical gags and more about Internet gags. It can be  pretty easy to pull off a prank online — especially since so many of us spend about every waking moment in front of a computer. Plus, pulling a prank online means you could get a ton of people at once to fall for your trick. For example, tweeting something like, “CRAZY video of me meeting Kanye West last night!” with a link to this video. Hilarious, I know. Feel free to use that one next year.

So what about company websites that take today to let loose and show everybody their wacky, fun side? Maybe you read about Google’s CADIE today, or maybe you excitedly clicked on the ad for the $99 pink leather Eames lounger in today’s Apartment Therapy email.

There’s also the extremely well-done (and daring!) Whole Foods homepage, which features a prominent ad for Organic Air that costs $6.99 for .02 oz (get it?), along with a bunch of recipes for dishes like Deep-Fried Pork Eclairs, Arugula Compost Surprise and… Toast. Mmmm.

The question is, if you’ve seen something April Foolsy today on a business’ website, how’d you find it? I’m willing to bet one or more of these things happened:

• You saw the link on your Twitter feed
• You saw the link on your Facebook feed
• Someone IMed/G-chatted it to you
• You saw the link on one of your favorite blogs (this one, obviously)
• A co-worker mentioned it during a lighthearted conversation at the watercooler

Next question: Did you tell someone about what you saw? Of course you did. That’s exactly what they wanted you to do. The April Fool’s Day joke was all about social media marketing, and by it getting passed from person to person via Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc., it was successful.

What’s more is that successful viral marketing like this means lots of inbound links to your website. That’s excellent for search engine optimization.

Maybe we won’t see as many classic pranks on future April Fool’s Days, but let me drop a pretty intense analogy on you here: By pulling off a well-done joke on a company website like Google.com or WholeFoodsMarket.com, isn’t that just the modern-day version of gluing a quarter to the ground on a busy street corner? People who first notice that quarter will pause to look closer, some bending down to try to grab it, which causes passersby to look and see what all the fuss is about. No matter what, everyone walks away knowing that there is a quarter glued to the ground.

(Whoa.)