Social Media Marketing Tip: How to Promote an Event on Facebook

Have an upcoming conference, webinar, bike ride, or social mixer? For marketers and event organizers, Facebook is still a cost-effective way to spread the word about all or any events happening this year in 2014. What is the best approach to fully take advantage of this advantageous social network? Take a look at these five simple ways in Facebook event promotion to increase your reach to a wider audience, persuade more people to attend, and build a bigger fan base.

1. Create a Facebook Event

A Facebook event listing is still a stellar way to increase reach about your event. Each time someone agrees to attend your event, it has potential to show up on their friend’s News Feed, providing you with some potential drive to your website or Facebook page.

Additionally, Facebook Event Pages are a great channel to answer questions, provide more details, and offer customer service. You can use the @tag to attach the event listing to Facebook posts and updates.

2. Take Advantage of #Hashtags

Hashtags are essential for promoting events and are fairly new on Facebook (the social network introduced them in June 2013). By creating a hashtag and encouraging users to include them in posts, you can provide a way to galvanize conversation about the event and discover what others are saying by searching for the hashtag on Facebook. If you haven’t read much about hashtags, take a look at our quick guide.

Overall, make sure that your event hashtag is short and sweet, easy to remember, and relevant. Place your hashtag on marketing materials, social networks, mobile apps, and news to promote it. Search for the hashtag to listen to what others are saying, gather feedback, and cover specific details of the event(s).

3. Utilize Highlighted Posts 

Highlighted Posts are a free way to amplify your status updates expanding them to a widescreen size so that it’ll always appear on near the top of your timeline. Upload logos, pics, and videos from previous or related events and highlight them by hovering on the top right hand corner of the post. You can always un-highlight posts at anytime and the post will fall back to when it was chronologically created on your Facebook timeline. 

4. Replace Cover Photo

In March 2013, Facebook updated the guidelines for cover photos, allowing businesses to include calls-to-action (CTAs). Create a cover photo about your upcoming event and include CTA copy on how they can learn more or register. The cover photo is usually the very first thing that user sees when they visit your Facebook page and any updates to a cover photo automatically show up in the News Feed.

5. Consider Facebook Ads

Don’t get us wrong, you can definitely reach a wide audience for free without using Facebook advertising, but ads still provide you with catching prospects – those who are most interested in your event, but don’t know anything about your business or organization and haven’t liked your Facebook Page. Facebook recently announced a change in their ad campaign structure for 2014, which will make it easier for advertisers to organize their campaigns.

Two types of Facebook ads we’d recommend: 

Page Post Ads

These ads help businesses by pushing any type of content you’ve already published on your feed (videos, links, status updates, deals and offers) to user news feeds and can appear on desktop or mobile. These can be placed in your News Feed and on the sidebar that can link to your website or webpage. These are created using Facebook Ads Manager and can be tailored to reach target users based on demographics, location, interests, and Facebook connections. Additionally, Facebook provides you with analytics to track results.

Promoted Posts

Promoted Posts give your posts a push to reach more users than it would normally reach. You’ve probably seen them as the “sponsored” posts in your news feed. These posts typically see more engagement because they are placed in the news feed and are a budget-friendly option for increasing awareness for your brand or event, especially on mobile. Downside? Less reach and targeting options.

Need help promoting your events on Facebook? Let us know! We’ll help you come up with a winning marketing strategy to help you maximize your reach.