When it comes to promoting your event, Facebook has the potential to be your most effective tool. But it’s not as simple as creating an event on Facebook and sitting back to watch your tickets sell out. With more than 47 million Facebook Events created just last year, you have to work to promote your event on Facebook in a way that makes yours stand out.
To find out how, we sat down with Virginia Maloney, the Product Marketing Manager of Facebook Events. Here are her top tips to promote an event on Facebook.
Learn about the benefits of connecting your Eventbrite event to Facebook here.
1. Promote events on your Facebook Page
The first thing you should do is optimise your Page to showcase your events. First, make sure your “Events” tab is one of the first tabs on your Page’s Timeline on desktop. This makes it easy for people to find your calendar and see a full list of your events. You can change the order using the “Manage Tabs” option in the “More” dropdown menu. (If the “Event” tab isn’t visible, you’ll need to create an upcoming event before managing the tab order.)
On desktop, you can also reorder the sections in the left-hand column so that “Events” appears at the top. (You can manage the order by clicking the pencil icon that appears when you hover over the unit.)
Be sure to check “Publish New Events to Timeline” within your “Event” tab, so people can find out when you create a new event.
2. Share your Facebook event
Need a simple but impactful way to promote your event on Facebook? Try sharing your event on your Page to reach your followers. To share your event, click the dropdown under “Invite” and then click “Share to Page.”
It’s also worth seeing if your ticketing or registration partner allows you to become a Facebook Official Event. If so, your event could qualify for better search and News Feed recommendations for even more visibility.
3. Highlight your event calendar
To promote all your events on Facebook at once, you can showcase a calendar of your upcoming activities. The link to your event calendar is your Facebook page URL with “/events” at the end: “www.facebook.com/[YourPageName]/events.”
To share your calendar, publish a post with a link to your event calendar. You can do this by going to your “Events” tab, then clicking “Share Events.” This post will automatically include a preview of your latest events. You can also send this link out on other channels, like a mailing list or fan club.
4. Extend promotion by adding your event to other Facebook Pages
There are often many people involved in organising and promoting an event. Rather than creating duplicate Facebook events, you can add your event to calendars on other organisation’s or individual’s official Pages. To do this, click the “More” dropdown on your event next to “Invite.” Then, select “Add to Page.”
This is a great strategy if you have well-known artists or sponsors involved with your event. Once your event is added to their calendars, their audiences can also discover it. That way, promoting your event on Facebook can be a group effort.
5. Take advantage of Facebook advertising
Facebook Event Ads are event creators’ secret weapon. One of the reasons the ads work so well, besides the fact that everyone is on Facebook all the time, is the way you’re able to target your campaigns very granularly.
You can segment who receives your ad by location, age, gender, likes and interests, connections, relationships, language, education, workplace, and more. One of the more advanced features Facebook offers is the ability to create a unique audience segment for your ad campaigns using your customer contacts (email addresses), website traffic, or mobile app. These are known as Custom Audiences.
Need More Info? Learn how to create and implement your Facebook ad strategy in our step-by-step guide.
6. Sell tickets directly on Facebook
You’re promoting your event on Facebook in countless ways. But you’re not converting enough “likes” and “shares” into ticket sales. What can you do?
Sometimes the answer is the most obvious one: sell tickets in the same place that you’re promoting your event.
If you use Eventbrite, you can now sell different ticket types or enable free registration directly on Facebook. This new checkout experience results in a 2x increase in actual ticket sales (Facebook data in partnership with Eventbrite, 2017).
The integration enables people to discover and purchase tickets for your Eventbrite event without ever leaving the Facebook app. Facebook has found that events that sell tickets directly on Facebook have, on average, twice the number of viewers on Facebook as those without native tickets.
According to Martin Keetels of Beer InCider, selling tickets directly through Facebook is “one of the most innovative parts of working with Eventbrite”. Beer InCider sold 10% of all tickets directly through Facebook, leading to 3x the ROI of their Facebook ad spend.
Need More Info? Learn how to set up Facebook integration in 10 minutes with this help centre article.
7. Make sure you know the latest Facebook Events updates
For the best strategies to use Facebook to get your event in front of as many people as possible and sell more tickets, check out these 4 Facebook Events Updates Event Creators Need to Know.
