Marketing Events on Facebook

It’s almost as if they created Facebook for event promoters. It’s as if Mark Zuckerberg was sitting in class at Harvard and thought, “How can we increase attendance at our frat parties?” and came up with the billion-dollar solution.

Regardless of the type of event—concerts, seminars, Christmas parties, charity chili cookoffs—Facebook is already considered by many to be the first step in creating an event’s marketing campaign.

Linday Gjerde, Director of Marketing and Public Relations for JadePresents (a Pollstar Top-100 promoter), markets over 150 shows per year. “Facebook and Twitter are the fastest most efficient way to get concert announcements to the public. The feedback from our audience is immediate and gives us a great idea of how successful a show will end up.”

Often promoters will set up a Facebook “Event” to announce the event to the page’s followers, and to gather up “RSVP’s” for the event. The invites show up just below the follower’s new live feed on the right hand of the page. They remain there until the follower accepts the RSVP request, denies it, or deletes the invite entirely. This allows a more-direct connection to the page’s followers—they’re not likely to miss it (like they might miss an update from the page).

Steve Seiden is owner of Resort Entertainment, “Facebook and Twitter are effective platforms for marketing events. But just how effective they are depends in large part on one’s cleverness in manipulating and exploiting some of the more sophisticated tools these platforms have to offer. Hence, anyone can market on Facebook and Twitter; but not everyone knows how to maximize these platforms’ potential for a given campaign.”
I have had little success getting feedback using Facebook’s Events function…I prefer marketing events entirely through the page updates—I think it invites far more interaction within the page’s community and allows for more-visible variety of content related to the event.

Some basic tenets of using your Facebook page to consistently market events:

Have A Page Worth Following. Does your page welcome the user? Does it look interesting in the first three seconds you look at it? If not, you might not get that valuable “Like” that you’re hoping for. Many businesses are now featuring custom-built videos and buttons that directly link to the company’s website—links that can go straight to the ticket-selling page.

It’s A Community, Not A Loudspeaker. Sure you should talk about your great upcoming event, but it doesn’t have to read like radio copy. Ask questions. Use the Facebook Poll feature. Ask followers to tell you about their past experience with the event or band. Be a fan—and talk to fans like they’re other fans, not customers.

An Event’s Not Over, Even After It’s Over. The concert was last night? Invite people to share their experiences, their favorite songs, or the one quote from the seminar that really resonated with them. Not only will you have some great interaction among them (building a community), but you might gain some insight into how to improve the event next year?  Was there a private reception or “Meet & Greet” for your event? If so, take lots of pictures, and post them on your page…those looking for the photos will need to follow your page to see them…and when they re-post those photos you’ll have some viral gold.

And we’ll see how the new Timeline affects event promotion very soon!