Promoting 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.
