At the top of your Facebook Business Page there is an icon marked, “Events”. Click on this to open a Calendar and use it to advertise a forth coming business event to your Facebook Friends. Sounds simple enough – and it is, except there are a few tricks to make this work harder for your business.
Many businesses recognise the power of Event Marketing. For example, you may have a conference to advertise, or you may be marking the launch of a new product. Retail business have traditionally advertised “Sales” through the use of Event Marketing. For example, “The Harrods Sale” is a now traditional event that is often marketed on national TV.
On Facebook, it is simplicity itself to add the title of a forthcoming Event and perhaps to add an image. But unlike, personal pages, one can’t simply share that event with all of your Facebook Business Page Friends. The Event will appear in your Facebook Timeline. People who have previously Liked your Business Page will only find it if they happen to be reading your Facebook Business Page or if they care enough to directly visit your Events Page to check out what you are up to.
If no ones Likes your Timelined Event, or better, Shares it, then very quickly it will be lost in the busy steam of new Posts to your Timeline. If you take a random look at the Events published by 98% of Facebook Business Pages owners- this is sadly, exactly what happens!
To make your Event stand out, the first thing you need to do is Highlight it (using the star in the top right hand corner of your Event as it appears on the Timeline), then get someone, anyone, to Like it and to Post something about it. The trick is to start getting someone to talk about your event. To create a Buzz that will keep it in your Timeline as a popular Post.
This is basic Facebook technique, but for some reason, many Facebook Page owners just do not bother to post further updates about the Event or respond to Posts about the event. You have to make it interesting too. So, new images, or audio, or video if you have it. Perhaps it would be useful to deploy a Countdown App to the Event, or a Counter about how many tickets have been sold. Or perhaps to use a competition. (First person in the queue gets a further 20% off). These are traditional Event Marketing techniques used on Facebook!
If you are advertising a recurring Event, then often it is acceptable and useful to publish photographs and video from last years event. If you do not have any, that’s too bad, but for goodness sake, make sure you capture some from this years event to use next year.
Clever retailers have found that they can use Facebook Event Marketing to directly sell goods on a Social basis. So if they were advertising the sale of an electrical product, perhaps yhey wouldn’t lower the price until 1,000 people had Liked the Page. For an expensive, sought after product, this can really realise the power of social referral, as everyone asks their Friends to Like your Page so that you will be encouraged to drop the price. Very clever indeed! Why not give this technique a try it?
