With a potential audience of 1.7 billion users, Facebook presents a stellar opportunity to market your next event.

But chances are you’re not the only item on the calendar vying for people’s attention.

In fact, over 47 million Facebook events are created each year, meaning you need to engage some serious strategy to stand out from what’s fast becoming a noisy crowd.

Here are the top tips to successfully promote your big event using Facebook.

Create your page

Facebook naturally caters well to organisations looking to promote an event, with an intuitive and easy-to-use Create Events feature. That said, there are some pro tips for ensuring your event hits the mark.

These include:

Use your organisation account – Facebook Create Events needs to be activated from your organisation’s page, not a personal account. This way you can employ useful features like the URL of your ticketing agency while targeting an audience that already follows what you do and is familiar with your brand.

Have a great pic – A picture paints a thousand words, so line up a good one that epitomises your event. The resolution should be 1920 x 1080 pixels, and bear in mind this is the image that you hope will be shared amongst Facebook users so should encompass what you want your audience to quickly understand. 

Have a short name – Like a good headline, an event name short be short, catchy and straight to the point, especially in a mobile era when people often access Facebook on small screens.

Embrace the algorithms – It’s Facebook, folks, so there’s good data and advanced algorithms at hand, but you have to input the right information to use it to best effect. Make sure you list your event under the right category and input the time and place it will occur.

Engage the ads – In addition to the Create Events feature, Facebook also offers to Boost Your Event and Event Response ads.

Facebook explains both can be targeted to the demographics of your choosing but response ads also allow you to: “…choose the audience you think will want to come to your event based on things such as where they are, their age, gender or interests. When they join your event, it will automatically be added to their calendar on Facebook”.

While setting up an events page and rolling out ads is a great start, they’re not the only tools available to effectively promote your event and should be considered as part of a wider publicity strategy. That strategy should include the following…

Employ your other media

Your website, organisation Facebook page and further social media should all be part of your pre-event push along with a planned campaign. Ensure you have upcoming events listed on your actual website and Facebook pages, with links to the destination you want people to reach.

Build momentum

Marketing is about building momentum, so use Facebook and available social media to keep people abreast of what will occur at your event, who’s coming, seminal dates like when tickets go on sale, and anyone who’s added to the lineup.

These updates should be targeted to the right audience to pique interest but not harass those already planning to attend, culminating in a sense of urgency that if people haven’t bought their tickets, they’ll be missing out.

On that note, it’s also a great tip to link up with other people involved in your event to maximise your audience.  

Use Facebook at the event

Finally, after all’s said and done, don’t forget to employ Facebook at your event to include an audience that couldn’t attend this time but may in the future. Facebook Live is great for this, as is Youtube.

While Facebook makes things easier, event promotion is an art that requires a number of tools to reach the widest possible. To create social media event marketing that hits the right spot, contact our team for further information here.