When it comes to the summer holidays, finding things to do and places to go to keep you and your family entertained can seem like a daunting task. There are many websites out there which provide information on forthcoming events in different areas and many of these are very useful but have you considered using social media so that information comes to you instead of you having to find it?
Read on to find out how.
Finding things to do with Facebook
Many organisations share details of events and activities on Facebook. You can find out about events easily. On the left-hand side when you log in scroll down until you see events and click “more”
This then presents you with a page which shows you events near you that are happening this week, Popular events near your location and suggestions of events that you might be interested in.
The events that are suggested for you are based on your likes / interests and those of your friends. A really useful section is that for subscribed events. This showcases events published by pages that you might like – again suggestions are based on your likes and interests and those of your friends. Here you have the option to subscribe to the events published by these pages which means that you are informed about all their new happenings without having to lift a finger!
If you want to search Facebook for events in a particular location just type in the search box at the top “events in” adding the location at the end. For example a search “Events in Oxford” returns:
You can also try searching for “things to do in…” as this will often bring up posts that have been published by tourist information offices or venues. For example, if you were heading to the Leeds / Bradford area you might see posts made by Visit Bradford.
Listen to what others are saying
Another tactic that you could take is to set up a Twitter list to monitor for certain phrases and keywords. This is something that is easy to do with a social media management tool like Hootsuite.
You could set up several lists to monitor for tweets about “events in Oxford” (or your chosen locations) and events aimed at certain types of person – “events for children” or “events for toddlers”.
If you are unsure how to set up search lists or you prefer to search Twitter directly you could try searching for particular terms and hashtags. For example, the folks over at Toddle on Down regularly use the hashtag #toddler together with a hashtag for a location so you could try searching for “#toddler #Oxford” to see what you can find.
Google Alerts
You can also monitor the Google index of web pages for any interesting new content that matches your chosen terms by using Google Alerts. This service will send you an email notification of new content that has been added to the Google Index. You could set this up with keywords or phrases related to the areas that you wish to visit, the type of activity that you might be interested in or phrases like “things to do for free in…”
How do you find things to do? Do you subscribe to newsletters? Social media broadcasts? Let us know your own tactics…