How to promote a dance event

A good-looking flyer does half the work, and the half it does is not the important one. Whoever sees it while scrolling decides in two seconds, and what they decide is whether they understand where and when. If that only exists as part of the image, it disappears the moment the image is shared on its own, cropped, or seen small.

So everything on the flyer also has to be written out as text: in the caption of the post and in the listing of any agenda where the event is published. Text can be copied, searched and translated. An image does none of those three things.

The list is short, and something is nearly always missing from it: the city, the name of the venue with its full address, the day, the time the doors open, the styles that will be danced, and how much it costs to get in. And if there is a class before the party, what time it starts.

The one most often left out is the exact address, and it is the one that costs the most: somebody who does not know the venue cannot go to a place they are unable to look up. The second is the class beforehand, because that is precisely the detail that convinces a person who does not yet dare to step onto a dance floor.

And if anything is different from last week —a band, a guest, a birthday— it goes at the top. People who already follow you skim past whatever repeats; what is different is what makes somebody share it.

Posting on your own social accounts reaches people who already know you, and that is what brings them back. It is a channel for reminding, not for being found.

Somebody who has just moved to the city, who is finishing a first month of classes, or who is passing through does not follow anyone yet: they type into a search engine. That person only finds you if your event is published somewhere searchable, in an agenda or a city listing.

These are two different jobs and neither replaces the other. An account with a large following can still have a half-empty room if nobody outside it knows the party exists, and the other way round: being in every agenda is worth nothing if the people who came once do not remember to come back.

Publishing in the Dancetomic agenda is free and it is done at dancetomic.com/publicar, with a link to your post or by filling in the form. The rest of what an organizer account can do is on the page for organizers.

A weekly social is decided late, often on the day itself. What works is having it published a few days ahead, for anyone searching, and then a reminder on the afternoon of the party, which is when people look at what to do that night.

A congress or a festival is the opposite: it is decided months ahead, because people have to ask for days off, find somewhere to sleep and sometimes buy the pass before the price goes up. Announcing it two weeks out is too late for almost everybody.

And a course that is starting gets announced before it begins, not after. Anyone who shows up in the third week feels like the last in line, and that is often why they do not join at all.

The teachers of the class beforehand, the DJ, the band, the dancers performing that night: each of them has an audience of their own and almost none of them use it for this. Asking them to post on the day, with a link to the listing, widens the reach without spending anything.

And the people who already came are the best channel there is. A photo of the night posted the following day, with the date of the next one written beside it, turns the party that just ended into the advert for the next one.

Posting only on the day of the event: whoever sees it already has plans. Moving the day or the venue every week, because a social rests on habit, and the same day in the same place is what makes somebody keep it in mind without checking. And paying for ads to get started: advertising amplifies what already works, and over a party with nobody in it what it amplifies is an empty room.

It is worth saying what this does not achieve, too. None of the above fills a room in a week. What makes a night work is repeating it for a few months, looking after the people who arrive on their own, and having the regulars recommend it. Announcing it well removes one specific problem, that nobody heard about it, and it does not replace the rest.