If your business has hosted an event recently, chances are you’ve used Facebook Events to promote and invite attendees—and for good reason. Facebook Events is a free and user-friendly marketing tool businesses can use to help get the word out about their event to the masses.
However, even with 2.23 billion monthly active Facebook users, it can sometimes feel like your small business’s event is being lost in the crowd. Is engagement low on your Facebook Events page? Chances are you aren’t using Facebook Events to it’s full potential!
Creating a Facebook Event is more than just listing details—it’s about optimizing your event promotion to capture the attention of relevant audiences who will actually attend. Whether it’s a local sidewalk sale, an industry-wide conference, or a virtual webinar, follow these simple marketing tips the next time you schedule a Facebook Event to help get noticed:
Tips for Creating a Facebook Event
1. Provide All Your Information in One Place
This first step may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many businesses neglect to provide the most basic information on their Facebook Event page: the Who, What, Where, When, and Why.
Don’t make your guests go searching the Internet for the event’s venue or cost of admission—this drives Facebook users away from your event page and can cause them to lose interest. It’s necessary to provide all of this valuable information in one place.
An enticing event title, location, date, and start/end time are all essential pieces of information to fill out on your event page. Use an eye-catching cover photo to attract potential attendees, or if you’re technologically savvy, Facebook has recently allowed businesses to post a video instead of a still photo.
Expand the important details of your event in the event description with compelling copy to boost the interest of attendees. Is a local popular band performing? Is there a dress code? Are you giving away free goodie bags to the first 50 people who RSVP? These are all things your attendees should know. If you’re selling tickets for the event, let guests know where they can get tickets for your event by adding a URL in the description. This is your one-stop place to include all the vital information for your audience.
2. Let Attendees Find You
Think of this next step as free marketing.
Under the description field, Facebook grants businesses a very special privilege: the power to select keywords. Keywords are descriptive words or phrases that relate to your event topic and correlate to the interests of Facebook users. Facebook in turn synthesizes your keywords and recommends your Facebook Event to users interested in similar topics.
Likewise, the location field of your event can be used as a local marketing gold mine. Instead of simply listing an address in the location field, try selecting a Facebook-recognized venue by utilizing Facebook’s drop-down field. By adding a Facebook-recognized venue to your event, Facebook will automatically connect your event to a map and recommend your event to local friends of your attendees and other nearby people.
To do so, start to type the venue’s location and Facebook will autocomplete the venue’s name, connecting it to their Facebook page. Facebook will also give you the option to add the venue onto the event page as a cohost. If Facebook doesn’t recognize your event’s venue, you can make a new Facebook-recognized venue yourself.
Pro Tip: If your event is virtual, use your business’s location as the Facebook-recognized venue. That way, your event will still get promoted to friends of attendees and local audiences.
3. Open the Lines of Communication:
The more engagement an event page has, the more it attracts potential attendees. We’ve all been through this before: if you hear a friend, coworker, and then a family member talk about a new movie that’s just been released, don’t you want to see it, too?
For this reason, allow Facebook users the option to post on the event’s timeline so they can ask questions, tag friends who they’d like to go with, and help drum up interest.
Businesses have two options for user interaction: Anyone can post (all posts and story items must be approved) or Anyone can post (reported posts and story items must be approved). We recommend the second option. This means that if someone flags a guest post as inappropriate, you can review the post for relevancy and remove it if it’s offensive.
Likewise, allow Facebook users the option to message you questions about the event over Facebook Messenger. This option comes automatically checked as “No” when you create an event page and cuts off valuable communication ties between you and interested parties.
Lastly, update your event page regularly with new information, but be careful not to come off as spammy—invitees will get notifications every time the host posts on the event page!
4. Optimize Your Event for Mobile Users
Did you know over 50% of Facebook users only use Facebook on a mobile device?
That means if your event page isn’t optimized for mobile users, you’re neglecting half of your potential attendees!
Make sure your event page is suitable for the smaller screens of smart phones and tablets. This may mean cropping your cover photo, shortening your event title, and editing down copy on your Facebook ads if you choose to run them.
In addition, if your event description includes a URL for ticket sales, you’ll want to make sure the checkout process is optimized for mobile.
5. Promote Your Event Across Facebook & Other Platforms
Now that you’ve crafted the perfect Facebook Event page, it’s time to show it off!
Optimize your business’s Facebook page to spark interest in your upcoming event by pinning your event to the business’s timeline, changing your page’s cover photo, and if budget allows, investing in Facebook Ads.
Through Facebook Ads, businesses can target potential attendees via region and interest, and even create targeted audiences through lookalike audiences, friends of friends, and importing email lists of past event attendees.
Pro Tip: Does your event have it’s own website page? Then we suggest using a strategic marketing tactic known as remarketing. Businesses can retarget visitors who have already visited the event website through Facebook Ads. By simply installing a Facebook pixel (a piece of HTML code) on the event website page, Facebook will track visitors who have visited the event page and target subsequent ads reminding them of the event the next time they log into Facebook.
Finally, just because the event page is on Facebook doesn’t mean you can’t promote it on other social media networks! Promote links to your Facebook Event page on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other platforms. You’ll find that using a cross-platform approach will bring forward new audiences and connect you with current customers who don’t follow you on Facebook yet!
Get the Word Out About Your Small Business’s Event on Facebook!
Facebook Events can be a valuable and effective tool small businesses can use to help get their events noticed by the right audience—but you have to know how to utilize its many features to your benefit. The next time your business is hosting an event, try utilizing these five marketing strategies to optimize your Facebook Event page to be sure to capture the public’s attention.
Looking for more insight about promoting events on Facebook? You can find additional tips here.
Need some help getting started with Facebook for your business? We’ve got you covered! Set up a social media consultation with our Facebook experts!