You have an idea for an event. You set up your Facebook event page. Now you wait for your target audience to indicate that they are attending your event. Sounds simple enough, right? But how often do we find that there aren’t enough people indicating their interest in the event? This is a common problem for many organizers and we address the 5 common mistakes that organizers make, so that you can learn from them.
1: Incomplete Information
When your event page goes live, you should have the basic information such as venue, time, date, cost, and link to ticket purchasing or registration. Information such as agenda can be updated on the page over time. But if the main information are not present on the event page, they will not be able to make the decision to buy the ticket at the moment itself since there are unknown variables.
2: Inviting everyone
Inviting everyone on your list of friends to your event might seem like a really easy way to increase the number of people who will attend your event. But this is an ineffective way of getting the right crowd to your event. Relevance is important at every stage of event planning, and invitation of potential attendees to your event shouldn’t be an exception.
Facebook allows you to invite people by association. So if you have organised other events before, you can invite the group of people who attended that event to your new event. Use this tool to invite the attendees that are more likely to come down for your event, and that in turn could have friends who are interested in your event.
3: Lack of Cross Promotion
When promoting your event on Facebook, you have to think beyond your own Facebook and event page as channels to use to convert potential attendees.
Leverage on the social influence of your event partners, speakers or performers at your event, and have them help cross-promote on their fan page as well. This can really help to increase the awareness of your event with a target audience that you may not have direct access to.
4: Dull Event Page
After you have set up your event page, you seldom update it! This is a cardinal sin for Facebook event pages. Of course, you must also find the balance between spamming the page constantly. You need to find the balance between the two extremes. The goal is to keep your attendees engaged on your page so that they feel excited about the upcoming event.
Keep them engaged with updates on agenda, behind the scene information, giveaways, or even something simple as a countdown to your event. Update with information that they are likely to re-share on their wall.
5: Not using Facebook Ads
If you have an event and you are exhausting your own channels, then using Facebook ads to boost your event would be a good plan. With the current Facebook algorithm, asking people to purchase tickets from your post status is not beneficial to you. This is because Facebook wants to be a channel for news discovery, and posts that are seen as being “salesy” or clickbait are pushed lower in the algorithm which shows Facebook users content on their newsfeed. This means that your post asking people to purchase tickets might not receive enough reach in the first place.
With Facebook Ads, you can set it up to directly target the audience that you would like to convert to your event attendees. To have a successful campaign, target by segmenting your audience and experiment with different images and copy used for your ad to see which one would result in higher conversions to ticket sales (i.e. A/B testing). You can set a budget, audience, and other parameters that can make it a very cost-effective marketing effort.
What are some of your tips when using Facebook as a channel to share your events? Drop them in the comments below.
