As we all know, Facebook is the biggest social networking platform in the world with over a billion users. Since its launch, Facebook has evolved and brought new features for users as well as businesses. One of their most improved features are Events, which give an opportunity to individuals as well as organizations to promote their events on Facebook. Before this change, the Events
feature didn’t work very well for organizations and was a much better tool to invite friends to events such as your backyard barbecue.
After years of research and design, Facebook has improved upon their Events feature and made it a great tool for marketers. Today, over 500 million people search Facebook Events each month to find local events to attend, making the Events feature an important marketing tool to increase attendees.
During a recent presentation by the Facebook Events team, Facebook talked about the new success of the Events Feature with a case study on the event “Water Fight New York NYC.” In 2014, before Facebook started focusing on Events, the Water Fight NYC only had 1,400 attendees showing on their Facebook Event. Then, in 2015, after more features were put in place, the event skyrocketed to 64,000 attendees.
How to Market your Event
For a more guerrilla marketing approach, you can invite your friends list and ask your friends, relatives and event staff to invite their friends and share the event on their personal pages. You are also able to use the Facebook ads to target your desired audience. When someone says they’re “Going” to your event, it creates a story that may appear in other’s News Feed so that their friends and followers can see they’re going and then decide to attend too.
To grow your attendee list using ads, you’re able to specifically advertise your event. This has a different mission than normal facebook ads, which is to get more attendees and ticket sales.
Event promoters often get better results when they:
- Set up a lookalike audience to show ads to people similar to your followers
- Use a CPM bidding strategy to get more people to respond to your event and buy tickets
- Create a conversion pixel to see which ads worked well and they can also measure performance
- Create an ad with using the “Ticket Link” which will allow you to create ads that are optimized to drive ticket sales
What do I do after my event?
So you just finished your event and can finally relax, right? Not exactly. People have connected because they truly care about your event and what you share about it. Facebook’s research has shown that event attendees are wanting the following:
- Professional pictures of the event action
- Final scores for competitions
- To be thanked for attending
- To know about future events from your organization
We hope that this has inspired you to add Facebook Events into your marketing efforts. You can also explore some great Facebook resources by reading through Facebook’s Guide to Getting the Most Out of Facebook Events.
Events are about community, culture, experiences and fun and Facebook is the avenue most people choose to share this experience. One inspiring statistic is that within one week of the event, each event attendee, on average, befriends another event attendee on Facebook. Events bring people together!