Facebook can be a powerful medium to help drive event ticket sales. This blog will take you through some best practices when marketing your event on Facebook.
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Best Practices for Marketing Your Event on Facebook
Tip #1 Create a Facebook Page for your event
If your event happened twice a year, keep the same page and simply adjust the cover photo and profile image to reflect the upcoming show. Make sure to keep your page title and URL generic, and not specific to one year. Let's say you're a band who's got an upcoming tour. Simply use your band's page to and add the events app.
Tip #2 Add the Events App
This is really easy, just follow these simple steps:
Step 1:
Step 2:
Now you should see the events app appear on your timeline:
The thumbnail image for your event will be drawn from the event's profile image. The dimensions for the app thumbnails are 111 x 74 px. Try shrinking your profile image down with Photoshop to 111 px wide and make sure the area you want visible sits above the 74 px mark.
Next you'll want to customize your cover photo and profile photo to promote your event.
Create visually appealing imagery that's appropriate for your event. Be sure to include event information like venue name and date. Also include a link to buy tickets in your timeline's about section.
Tip #3 Do a Giveaway
Here's a really simple tip that Toronto's Bridal Show did for their upcoming event.
Upload a photo, for every Like a person is entered into a draw, if a person comments it counts as two entries, and for every share the person gets 5 entries. There is one caveat. Only publicly viewable likes, comments and shares count as entries. This is simply because private shares, comments, and likes aren't viewable by your page. This is a really simple way to generate organic word of mouth for your event. See the example below:
Tip #4 Create Facebook Ads for your Event
We've had a lot of success with Facebook ads for Toronto's Bridal Show. Instead of creating an ad for your page or website, try creating an ad for your event. The benefits are a higher click through rate and the ability for people to invite their friends directly from the ad. This makes it super easy for people to make plans around your event!
Another critical element is taking advantage of Facebook precise interest targeting. For Toronto's Bridal Show we targeted people with the following ad. Notice the target: engaged women, 18+, within 80km of the venue's city.
With this ads we saw a 0.088% CTR (that's very high, 0.040% -.0050% is considered average). The end cost to Toronto's Bridal Show was $3.30 per person replying to the event. Not bad, especially when you consider most people don't attend events alone. The key here is finding an engaged audience (pun intended). Another example would be targeting a group of people who like similar things e.g. if i were promoting a U2 concert, I might want to target Coldplay fans. A strong call-to-action in your ad will also help, in this case "invite your friends & RSVP today!" helps to drive home the desired action.
Tip #5 Create Multiple Admins and Have Them Invite Friends
If you have a group of people working at your event, invite them to become page administrators. That way they can invite their friends to the event fanpage. Facebook does not allow you to send invitations to your existing fans, so your best bet is to post about it often and invite as many people as you know. Check out this post that will show you how to increase your Likes by inviting your LinkedIn and Outlook contacts.
Tip #6 Treat your Event Wall Like Your Page's Wall
Be sure to add your address, info about your event, the date and post links, photos and videos on the event wall. Facebook doesn't yet allow for a whole lot of customization for event pages, so an active wall is probably your best selling tool once people land on your event page.
Tip #7 Create Messages for Attendees, Maybes, and People Who Haven't Replied
This is simply the idea of following up. Just like the dentist will call you a day or two in advance, so should you before your event date arrives. You may wish to create different messages for different groups. Let's say you've go a few people who've haven't replied to your invite; why not send them a message with a ticket coupon discount, or a buy one get one free offer.
To send invitees a message just follow these simple steps:
Now select which group of guests you'd like to send a message to:
Tip #8 Have fun!
Post lots of photos and videos during your events. Create signage with your Facebook page URL. Ask people to post on your Timeline during your event and be sure to participate in the conversation.
Facebook Event Marketing in a Nutshell
There are still a ton of things you can do. Your creativity is your only limitation. If you have any other Facebook event marketing ideas please feel free to leave them in the comments!
Please feel free to connect with me on social media @strategyinventr or leave a comment below!
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Hello, First of all, your information is very amazing and so much inspired by me. Keep it up and Thank you very much.:)
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Creating multiple admins help as they can invite their friends and the audience will increase just like a chain reaction. Just make sure at least one admin is active because that will make sure that the interaction with the contestants or community is good.
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Ummm in 2009 Facebook changed its promotion guidelines. Users ARE NOT allowed to use likes, comments, and shares in a giveaway or sweepstakes aka promotion. Yes, people get away with it, but not ALL do. Some pages have been shut down for not following the not-so-new rules.
And with Facebook cracking down on false accounts and commercial text in cover photos and promoted posts in 2013 its bound to find and shut down more accounts not following rules. I suspect you don’t hear a lot about closing accounts because who wants to admit publicly Facebook shut down their pages or profiles.
Contest, giveaways, sweepstakes, etc MUST NOW be done through a 3rd party application that does NOT utilize likes, shares, and comments as means of entry. Apps like Wildfire, NorthSocial, and Involver are great. There are some FREE option available too, just Google.
To learn more about Google’s promotion rules read: http://sheersocial.com/facebook-changed-its-contest-rules-didnt-you-get-the-memo/#.UN0tybam430
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Very interesting post. I would like to see other similar posts on Facebook marketing here.
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Extreme check out “Should I Drive my Facebook Ads to a Fanpage or a Website?”
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Solid post Steve. This is detailed. For #4, i think the Facebook ad center is great to help test and discover your target market, but have you really seen success through their ads? Didn’t think the CTR was very good.
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Thanks Ian. We actually found very strong CTRs for event ads in Facebook. I think out CPA was $3.50. When you consider that a person is likely to bring guests, the CPA was even lower!