Promoting An Event on Facebook
ByPromoting your event on Facebook is an inexpensive way to gently market your business to your Facebook friends. It’s also a great way to promote charities and non-profits.
Whether your event is a live event at a physical location or a virtual event being held over a bridge line, by following a simple strategy you can easily attract more people to your event.
Link Your Event to a Group or Page
If you have a Facebook Page or Group whose members are a good audience for your event, create the event from within that Page or Group. While you’re on that Page or Group click the “Create a Related Event” link.
You do this for two reasons: first, your event will appear in the Group or Page, visible to all members. Second, you can then automatically invite all the members of the group.
When creating an event, choose a compelling name and tagline: something that will entice readers to learn more. Include as much detail as possible in the description section. If your event is virtual, include a link to the sign-up page on your website if you are collecting email addresses before sending the call-in information. Be sure to include a photo for the event.
Once the event is created, start inviting your friends. If other people are participating in the event, encourage them to invite their friends as well.
Add Photos and Video
If you have photos of people who are speaking at the event or somehow participating, add them to the photos section of the event page (with permission of course). This does two things. First, every time you add something to the event it will appear in the news feeds of your friends. Second, after you add the photos, you can tag the people who are in them. This just means pointing them out and naming them in Facebook. This adds further visibility to your event.
Likewise, you can add video, post related links, and encourage people to write on the event’s wall.
Try Facebook Ads
If you don’t mind spending a little money, use a Facebook ad to generate more interest. The nice thing about Facebook ads is you can narrowly focus your ad to very particular audiences.
You can specify geographic region, gender, age and a variety of keywords within the ad. Only people who meet this criteria will see the ad. Start paying attention to the ads you see when you are navigating around Facebook. You’ll see that the ads are very targeted to your demographic.
When you are creating your Facebook ad you can “apply social action” to the ad, meaning you can link it to your event page. This means when someone clicks on the ad, they will automatically be taken to your Facebook event page.
I recently used Facebook ads myself for two different events. For less than 50 dollars I was able to attract a lot of attention for each event. I also received a number of emails and friend requests from people who saw the ad and decided even though they weren’t interested in the event, they wanted to learn more about my business.
A few things to note about promoting your event. Don’t invite too many of your friends at one time or send too many messages to your Groups or events attendees or you can run afoul of Facebooks spamming rules. But if you give yourself enough lead time before the event, and spread out your activities over several days or weeks and you should have no problem getting the word out.
And the best thing about promoting events on Facebook is that with the exception of using ads, the entire process is free. So even if you only get a handful of new people this way, you’ll still be better off than you were before.
Andrea J. Stenberg
Have you ever promoted an event on Facebook? How did it go? Leave a comment and share what you did and how the event went.
Hello Andrea
I will be looking forward to reading what people think about promoting an event of facebook.
I’m currently reading Facebook for Dummies by Carolyn Abram and Leah Pearlman (they are both Facebook Product Managers) Wiley for a book review I’m writing for a magazine that write for. My interest is how Facebook and LinkedIn (LinkedIn for Dummies by Joel Elad, MBA) can be used for professional and personal productively.
Good article. Looking forward to more of the ‘How to” articles. I feel they are so needed.
Mireille
Good article, Andrea.
Recently I promoted my tele-seminar on Facebook – without using paid ads – and ended up with more than 100 new subscribers to my email list.
Most of the new people ware NOT my facebook friends, and this proves it pays to advertise an event even if you have a small list of friends – or group members, fans, etc.
I accidentally created an event through my Facebook PROFILE and not through my business PAGE. Invitees have already rsvp’d, commented, etc. Is there any way to add the event to the PAGE? I do not wish to create a duplicate event without the connectedness I’ve already established. Also I don’t want to look dumb in front of a sophisticated Facebook audience.
And I still can’t figure out where my mistake was, I’ve created an event before using the same steps (I think) and it published to my PAGE, not PROFILE. Help?
I have exactly the same issue as Matt. I’ve created an event and had many rsvp, yet have now joined a group for the venue hosting the event and want to add the event to this group so i can invite their fans/friends and don’t want to create an duplicate event.
Can this be done?
Any thoughts?
To create an event tied to your Facebook page, you have to be the in page’s admin area, otherwise the default is to have the event connected to your personal profile. While in the admin area you can add an event tab to your page. That should make it easier to create events tied to your page.
As to moving an event to associate it with a group, here’s how Facebook describes it:
“In order for an event to appear in the Events section of a group’s page, you will need to set the group as host of the event from the Edit Event page. In order to do this, you will need to be the admin of both the group and the event. You may always request admin status from a current admin. Please note that an event can only be hosted by one group.”
http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=829#!/help/?faq=13524
Hope this helps.
Another good way to promote events is a new site called eventtap (http://eventtap.com) that lists events going on right now in your area- should be pretty popular within the next few years I suggest you check it out as a possibility
doesnt seem like a way to “promote,” Jordan, seems like more of a spur of the moment way to tell people that somthing is going on while they are at home
Justin,
I agree that Jordan’s link does sound like it’s just for what’s on now and doesn’t allow for any advance notice. However, I’m all in favor of using multiple methods for marketing and promotion. Why don’t we wait and see how this one comes out in the end?
Such an excellent text! No idea how you came up with this post..it’d take me long hours. Well worth it though, I’d suspect. Have you considered selling banners on your website?