Every twenty minutes, about 1.5 million event invites are posted to Facebook. It’s crucial that you take the right steps to get the kind of exposure that you’re looking for, as not to get drowned out among the noise of all those events.
Utilizing Facebook Events is an excellent way to educate your audience about your events and prompt them to attend.
Create the Event
You should create this event on behalf of your organization, not on behalf of your personal account, so head to your organization’s page and click the “Offer, Event +” button, then click event. This will bring up the form to add in some information about your event.
Give Your Event a Name
The name should be informative enough that people will know what is going on at your event, but shouldn’t be too long. As far as I know, there is no limit on how many characters you can have for your title, but put the specifics in the “details” box under the title.
Make sure you fill in all of the information to make sure your event page look complete. It even gives you the option to add in a link to tickets if you use services like Eventbrite.
Pick a Target Audience
Something Facebook has added that’s fairly new is the ability to target your event. This provides an awesome opportunity to reach the right people instead of just a large quantity of people. One disclaimer I would add is to try not to get too specific if you want to reach more people. As you can see in the screenshot, I’m limiting the potential audience from 573 to 0-20. Targeting an audience can be helpful, but it’s not always necessary.
In some cases it’s okay to reach less people. In all reality, you could be reaching hundreds of people, but if the only ones you really need to reach are those 20 you can cut the fat by targeting your event.
Choose a Photo
Once you’ve filled in all of the information about your event, add an event photo and a cover photo that is intriguing and isn’t blurry. The best dimensions for an event cover photo is 714 x 264 pixels.
Send Out the Invite
When you’re done creating your event, start inviting people. It’s okay to be “that guy” once in awhile. You can also share the event page to your own Timeline. If you want, there’s an option to pay to boost the event so it shows up in your target audience’s newsfeed.
If you do invite people manually, try to target who you’re inviting. For example, we have an open house for nonprofits in Nebraska to learn about our coworking space, so we will be inviting people in the nonprofit community to attend, not our necessarily just our bff’s.
The average Facebook user has 130 friends. When someone tells Facebook they’re going to your event, it will show up to their friends on the event page that they’re going which will make them want to attend as well. Beautiful, right?
Rinse, Repeat
Make use of the Facebook Insights for your event. It’s fairly short and sweet, but really helps you see how many people you’re reaching, viewing and engaging with your event page. This will help make your event better in real time, as well as take notes on what tweak you need to make your next event more successful.
To get better engagement, don’t click the box that lets only admins post to the event wall. You want people to converse about your event, ask questions and talk up how life changing it will be.
As always, keep in mind that Facebook is just one vehicle to get you to destination exposure. Using Facebook events is part of this balanced (marketing) breakfast. Let it play right into direct mail, flyers and any other creative way you decide to advertise your event.
BONUS TIP:
When you decide to go to someone else’s event, you can export events to your Google Calendar.
-
Go to the event you’d like to export and click
> Export Event -
Select whether to save the event to your computer or send it in an email
-
Click Export
> Export Event
