How to promote a fight night on social media

Most fight nights are sold on Instagram and TikTok, and most promoters run those accounts on their own, late at night, with a poster and a caption. The posts that sell tickets are not complicated. They are just relentless: one clear thing per post, the date and venue every time, and a link that goes straight to the ticket.

This guide sets out the content plan that works for an independent card, stage by stage, and what each post has to do. At the end we show how SHWDWN makes every one of these videos for you, branded to your promotion, from the fight card you have already built.

The rule every post follows

Every post answers three questions before anyone scrolls past: who is fighting, when and where, and how do I get a ticket. If a post only answers one of them, it is a teaser, and teasers do not sell tickets on their own.

Keep it vertical (1080 by 1920) so the same video works on Reels, TikTok, Stories and Shorts. Keep the important words in the middle of the frame. On Reels the top of the screen sits under the header and the bottom under the caption and the like and share buttons, so anything there gets covered.

And end on the ticket link. People act at the end of a video, not the start, so the last frame should be the link and nothing else.

Stage 1: announce the show

The event announcement. Poster, date, venue, "tickets on sale". This is the post that goes out the day tickets go live, and it is the one you pin.

Fighter announcements, one per fighter. This is where most of the sales come from, because each fighter shares their own post to their own followers. Across the combat events sold on SHWDWN, about 56.4% of ticket sales arrive through a fighter's own link. One video per fighter gives each of them something worth posting, with their name, record and the date.

Bout announcements. Two fighters face to face. They give the rivalry a story and give both camps a reason to post.

The full card reveal. Every bout in one video, once the card is settled. This is the post people send to their friends to decide which show to go to.

Stage 2: sell the tickets

Announcements build interest. The next job is removing every reason not to buy. The biggest one is surprisingly simple: people do not know how. A buyer who taps a link in your bio, lands on a page they have never seen, and is asked to make an account will often give up.

The how-to-buy video walks through the purchase on a phone, step by step, from finding your event to the ticket on screen. Post it in Stories with the link, and post it again whenever sales go quiet. It answers the questions that otherwise arrive in your DMs.

If you sell pay-per-view as well, post a PPV version for everyone who cannot make it in person. "Can't make it? Watch it live" reaches a second audience who were never going to buy a ticket to the venue.

Stage 3: fight week

The last seven days sell more tickets than any other week, and they need the most posts. A countdown, seven days out, three days out, the day before and on the night, keeps the show in front of everyone who meant to buy and has not yet.

Ask every fighter to share the countdown too. Their followers are the people most likely to turn up on the night.

Making all of this without a designer

Done by hand this is a lot of videos: one per fighter, one per bout, a card reveal, how-to-buy and four countdowns, all updated every time the card changes. That is why most promoters stop at the poster.

Social content is the part of the SHWDWN promoter dashboard that makes them for you. Set your logo, your colour and a short event name once, and every video above is made from the event and fight card you already built: event announcement, fighter and bout announcements, full card reveal, PPV announcement, how-to-buy and the fight-week countdown. Fighter photos come from each fighter's profile. Every video carries your brand, not ours, and ends on your event's ticket link.

The videos above are real examples, made from a sample event. When the card changes, a video that is out of date is marked so you can make it again, and you can download the lot in one go. It is included for every combat promoter at no extra cost: promoters pay nothing on SHWDWN, and buyers pay the booking fee.

Fighters are the other half of the plan. For how to turn their followers, and other creators, into ticket sales, read how to sell fight tickets with influencers and streamers. For the rest of the sales plan, see how to sell out a fight night.