4 Tips to maximize your events with Facebook Events

Ok, so you’ve taken the step to create an event page on Facebook, now what?

First, you invite your close friends. You post to your Facebook page hoping your followers will see it there. Then you hope it goes viral. More often than not, everything stops there and you find it doesn’t yield fruitful results.

But that doesn’t have to be the case. The last thing you want is for you to create an event only to see poor attendance and/or engagement. It’s not easy to do sometimes, but keep in mind that the Facebook Event page is only one marketing channel, and it’s free to set up so why not?

In this post, I’ll share 5 tips to make sure you are getting the most out of Facebook Events.

1. Use a gorgeous cover picture for the event

This is the first thing that everyone sees on your event page and there’s no reason to be lazy with it. More importantly, this is the image that everyone will see in their news feed when you are trying to get it to go viral.

Facebook Event Page

How the event looks in the news feed (right side is cropped)

The above example makes it clear why you want to make sure you do the following:

1. Use a great image
2. Include some info on the image
3. Multiple Dimensions — include multiple dimensions

In the above, wow they did pretty good with #1 and #2, you can see how Facebook ends up having to crop the cover picture when placing into the news feed. The following dimensions are recommended for each:

• 785x295 pixels — for the event page
• 470x174 pixels — for the news feed
• 150x100 pixels — for the upcoming events section

Ideally you have great photos from past events, but if not, don’t worry. There are plenty of places to get a great stock photo to help showcase what your event is about.

• Stock Photos — Flickr (Creative Commons), Pexels and Unsplash are great sources
• Edit the Photos — Canva — super easy to use to add some text to the photos

Some more examples below

A little text heavy — but may work because people will click when they see an artist they like

Great image of event — gives people a good idea of what to expect

Happy medium! — High quality image showcasing event and some minimal text highlighting details of the event

2. Show social proof by driving RSVPs

Initial Invites

So we already talked about inviting your closest friends which is easy enough when they provide the hand Select All feature. But what about all those other friends that you have to go manually select? Rather than manually going in and selecting each person, download and install this handy chrome plugin “Invite All Friends on Facebook” to automatically invite all your Facebook friends with just one click. Just be careful with this though, Facebook is always changing how things work, and you do want to maintain a good RSVP to Invite ratio if you can. So leverage the groups part on the left to target who you are inviting rather than blasting your entire network. One simple limitation is to only invite friends that are at least in the same city of the event!

3. Promote your event across all channels

Use all of your marketing channels

You don’t have to rely on just organic Facebook traffic to your event page. Cross promote your Facebook event on all of your marketing channels.

Using Eventbrite to sell tickets to the event? Include a link in the description on Eventbrite that tells people to “Don’t forget to RSVP on Facebook as well”. Furthermore, send a confirmation email to people who purchase tickets that includes a link to RSVP on Facebook.

Have an email list from previous events? Send out a newsletter to your subscribers promoting your event, and instead of taking them directly to the ticketing page, drive them to your Facebook event page to promote virality (from there, you can include a link to the ticketing page on your Facebook event page).

Did you host a previous event? Post a comment on your previous event to promote the event to all of your previous attendees.

Facebook Advertising is always an option, just make sure you are getting the right ROI on your ads. In general though, unless you have a premium event that you can hyper target, we haven’t found this to be super cost effective. You could probably get an RSVP for $1 to $2 but ultimately you need to actually see how many ticket sales this results in to see if it provides positive ROI.

4. Get people engaged

By getting people to comment on your event page. So why is this important? Well beyond driving people directly to your event page, the key to your event going viral is getting it show up in people’s news feeds in the first place. So in addition to RSVPs driving this, engagement via comments will also boost the event to make it more likely to show up on the commenter’s friend’s news feeds.

You can ask questions, conduct polls and always respond to comments to spark engagement.

Final Thoughts

No matter what you do to market your event, ultimately it always comes down to the event itself. Word of mouth is still really important if you want to consistently drive an audience to your events but these tips are a great way to make sure that people hear about your event in the first place.

If you have any other tips on how to promote your event on Facebook, feel free to leave comments.