Your first Slipmat events - before, during and after

Here are some helpful tips for creating and managing your live events on Slipmat.

1. Before the event

The earlier you schedule your event, the more time you have for promoting it and the more time your audience has to discover it. Audience can also subscribe to get a notification when you start it so they won’t forget or miss the beginning. “Subscribe for notifications”-button is shown on every events public page.

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From the marketing point of view, event name and poster image are the most important details. When you share your event on Facebook or Twitter, those details are used for the preview post as well. Here’s an example from Facebook:

Tags are used on Slipmat mainly for discovery purposes. By tagging your event with meaningful tags, you help others to find you and your past and future events. Tag pages are also indexed by Google and other search engines and we have lots of ideas making them truly interesting topic pages by including relevant news, mixes etc. (At the moment we’re still missing the manpower for doing things like these, all help is welcome! :slight_smile: )

Is Public -toggle is for creating test events and other private events. Private events are normal events that aren’t shown on Slipmat homepage, your public DJ page nor in any of the stats pages. Anyone with a link can join private event. If you want to test your setup or Slipmat in general, you probably don’t want to smear your public DJ profile with these nor spam your fans with notifications of non-events, so marking the these kind of events private lets you test things out in in peace. You might also want to spin an event only for a small group of friends or fans, that’s another good use for private events.

Enable Requests -toggle does exactly what it says on the tin; it enables or disables the Slipmat request system (todo: do a better writeup on this and link here) for the event by default. You can also enable/disable this during your event so don’t worry if you’re unsure about using requests at this time.

It’s also good to remember that Slipmat events are not cast in stone; feel free to edit and amend any details at any time. You can edit the details right to the moment before you start the show. Also do post the event link to all your social media pages as soon as possible – that way you’ll reach as much audience as possible.

2. During the event

Slipmat events have 4 stages:

  1. Scheduled
  2. Warmup
  3. Live
  4. Archived

After you create your event, it is now scheduled. If your event is marked as hidden / test event, it is not shown anywhere else but in your DJ admin, but if it’s a normal event, it will now be shown on Slipmat homepage (for logged in users) and your public DJ profile page (for everyone).

Starting and stopping

When you first start your streamer and preview it, you’re starting the event in warmup mode. This stage has large warmup-decorations shown on the live page and while the event video and chat is already working, your event has not been started yet. Warmup mode lets your listeners to join the event and you to do send the final promo links etc. The suggested time for warmup is to start it 30 minutes before starting your actual show.

When in warmup mode, you’ll find “Star event” button in your admin console from the live page. When you click this button, the event is started and the page refreshes. This also starts all the statistics collections and other background processes. Now your event is live and you can start your show.

When your show has ended, we currently do not have a cooldown mode. This means that when you end the event, the chat is shut down and your listeners are immediately redirected to the homepage. Note that you can also manually change the redirect to any other event either in warmup or live mode. So if you want to give your listeners a place to continue the party, do set a redirect to some other event :slight_smile:

3. After the event

Unlike on most streaming sites, on Slipmat your event doesn’t die when you stop streaming. In fact, aftermarketing is your best chance to find new fans and audience. You’ll find all of the aftermarketing tools right from the event archive page from the DJ admin. The power of aftermarketing is in the long tail of your past events. Imagine that you have played for example 100 sets on Slipmat; you now have 100 good and true examples of your work and 100 distinct pages where potential new fans can discover you. But this obviously doesn’t come for free, you need to put some effort in it. Luckily, Slipmat helps you all the way!

Uploading your set list is a great way to do the bare minimum; if you use Rekordbox, Serato or Traktor, you have either a history file or pre-built playlist from your set that you can export and upload to the event page. Your audience gets a nicely formatted set list and it is also free food for Google and other search engines to index and find you. This is something you definitely should do and of course then also link the public event page to your listeners.

(We have plans to make further use of uploaded tracklists as well. We could for example collect “Slipmat TOP 40”-lists etc from those, automatically add them to the DJs request system collection, use for “if you liks this DJ, you might also like this”-suggestions etc. Lot’s of more potential here!)

Embedding recording is again an easy way to bring listeners back to your event page. If you use sites like MixCloud or Hearthis.at to archive your sets, grab an embed code and post it here and your listeners can replay your set right from the event page.

We have plans to promote these recordings more widely on the site as well, for example using tags: if your event main tag (first tag) is trance, and you’ve embedded a recording, we could show that recording to all users who visit the Slipmat main Trance -tag page.

If you are serious about growing your audience, following and studying the huge amount of detailed statistics is an invaluable tool for you. As long as you have filled out your DJ profile properly, Slipmat keeps detailed statistics on your social media likes/followers so you can see how each of your events affect your fanbase. You can test out different marketing strategies and see right from Slipmat how it affected your listener numbers and for example Facebook page likes pre- and post the event. This is something that you need to pay big money on some specialized sites, but get totally free and 100% integrated here on Slipmat.

One very important statistic to follow is First Time Users. This shows you the users who signed up spesifically for your set; they are your most valuable listeners. You also know that if you have 100 listeners at your event but no first time users that you only played to an audience who knew you already. On the other hand if you only had 50 listeners but 25 of them were first time users, it means that you managed to get 25 new fans during that event – you must have done something very well!

Hope you learned something from this. Feel free to suggest additions and ask for more if you have any questions. See you on Slipmat! :slight_smile:

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