Tip #4: Use Facebook to Promote Your Events
Welcome to 14 Days of Facebook Marketing Tips, on the occasion of the upcoming launch of “The Facebook Guide to Small Business Marketing†(Wiley) by Ramon Ray, of Smallbiztechnology.com and Infusionsoft.
Buy Ramon’s latest book on February 19th and get a digital box of goodies as your gift for buying the book, educating yourself and growing your business with Facebook.
In The Facebook Guide to Small Business Marketing, you will overall learn how to get more customers and keep the ones you have. You’ll also learn how to leverage overall online marketing, how to better use social media and, more specifically, how to use the power of Facebook for YOUR business.Â
Tip #4: Use Facebook to Promote Your Events
You’ve got a special event planned for your business, but how are you going to let everyone know about it  Sure, you can start an email marketing campaign to invite those individuals in your contact list, but that’s so limiting.  You can request to have your event posted on the many event websites, some of which are free and some are not, OT!), but that takes a lot of time to manage and there’s no guarantee you’re getting to the right sites. So how can you get information about the event in front of literally billions of people  Use Facebook!!
Facebook is a great tool for getting information about events to your customers and followers. Even better, it opens the opportunity for you to extend the reach to your followers friends and their friends and their friends…I think you get the point! Facebook is perfect for all types of events;  book and music launches, retailer in-store promotions, webinars, networking events, fundraisers, seminars - any type of event you can think of really.The best part is you manage it all from one platform, for no cost (unless you incorporate an ad program) and it’s SIMPLE.
Here are a few tips for creating and promoting an event on Facebook:
- Create Your Event Early and Announce It Regularly.  Create your event well in advance of the event date.  This will allow you plenty of time to promote the event to your followers. You’ll want to schedule regular announcements of the event to your Timeline, keeping in mind that you don’t want to overdue it, as that may cause people to stop following you.  You can use a social media scheduler, like dlvr.it or Hootesuite, to schedule out your posts and make managing much easier.Â
- Keep Your Announcements ‘Fresh’.  Make sure each post about your event is unique and ‘fresh’ so your followers don’t get bored.  You can use ‘teaser’ content in the announcements, such as photos showing event preparation, photos from past events or text like “Look what is coming soon…â€.  These posts are a great way to share excitement about your event and entice people to come.
- Link With Other Event Apps. There are other event apps, such as Eventbrite or Meetup, that allow you to connect your events to Facebook. Â By creating an event in those applications, you can create a link to your Facebook page, which creates a post and the ability to easily link back to those apps to register for the event.
