TUTORIAL: Facebook Events
Facebook Events are an awesome digital marketing & promotion tool!
First and most obviously, they list your event on your band page, on Facebook, for free. Every band or show should be using them all the time. But more than that, there are specific things you should think about to get maximum exposure for your event.
So what happens when you create an event? Here’s the list:
- The Event gets published to your bands event list on their page.
- Facebook puts that event on your main page, as a Facebook post, which in turn will go out to many people following your page.
- Facebook puts that event in front of some of your friends.
This by itself is a great place to share your band imagery, your artwork, your brand or indeed your content. But there is something far more powerful available to you with Facebook Events.
Once your event is posted, you can invite people to it. Now depending on how you have your Facebook page set up, you might be logged into Facebook on your band profile or your personal profile. The trick here is to set up an Event under your band profile but then switch to your personal profile. Once you’re in your personal profile, you can go back to your event and invite all your Facebook friends to the event.
Click the INVITE button on the event page:
When you click the INVITE button, Facebook opens a new dialogue box that allows you to select which of your personal friends to invite to your show:
From this box, you can select ALL FRIENDS and then select the friends in the list that you want to invite to the event. Our suggestion would be to suggest ALL your friends.
Now I know what you’re going to say… You might not want to invite all your friends because you don’t want to annoy people who perhaps live at the other side of the world or for whatever reason, would never attend your show. This is a mistake. You should absolutely invite ALL your friends! The reason?
Firstly, you won’t annoy them. They will have the option of blocking your event invites when they receive them and if they do block your invites, that’s a great thing because it qualifies your invite list for you. The same is true of unsubscribers when they unsubscribe from your email database (you DO have an email database don’t you?). Every unsubscribe means the mailing list qualifies itself to become that bit more targeted. You would much rather send 10 emails to fans of your show rather than 10,000 random emails wouldn’t you? Your database is far more powerful when it’s qualified and targeted.
The second major reason you might want to invite ALL your friends is, you friends might not respond to the invite, but there is a chance that their friends will see the event and their friends are more likely to respond or share the event if it’s also socially qualified (ie they can easily see that their friends are also going to the event or at the very least interested in it).
Think about the numbers here. If your band has 5 musicians and they all have 500 friends on Facebook, that’s 2,500 invites sent out to real people that they personally know. If each of those friends has 500 friends, then there is the potential to have your invite put in front of 1,250,000 real people on Facebook, multiple times. What’s even better is, that Event becomes associated with each person on Facebook even if they don’t respond to it and when they are looking at other events at any point in the future, there’s a good chance that your event will pop up in front of them as a possibly interesting event for them, which means multiple exposures to your band, your show, your artwork and your brand. Did we mention, all of this costs nothing? It’s completely free. Even if you get only one ticket sale from this entire exercise, you’ve just made a tenner for two minutes work!
The final thing to do when you’re setting up an event on Facebook is to make sure you use all the boxes on the event setup itself. An important one is CO-HOSTS. The host of the event is your band (assuming you set the event up on your band page) or yourself (assuming you set it up on your personal Facebook profile). But you can also add other entities on Facebook as a co-host. For example, the venue, the promoter or indeed anyone else involved in the event in an official capacity. When those entities accept the co-host (tell them about it!), this same event will be listed in their events page. You will end up with one Facebook event, centrally administered by any and all co-hosts. The promoter and venue will use that event. It will appear on their Facebook page when they want to post it easily.
Want to see it in action?
Right now, I’m on a Facebook Event page, for an event that I am a co-host on. On the side of my screen is a list of 6 suggested events.
- 1 of those events is my own
- 1 of those events I am a co-host on because I’m helping to promote them. If I wasn’t a co-host, Facebook would use this space to suggest another event to me.
- All the other events are nothing to do with me BUT, they are all highly targeted because all of them are in my area and 1 of them I attended in 2022 but didn’t know it was happening again in 2023.
- 4 of those events are “socially herding” me to them, because I can clearly see multiple friends are also attending or interested.
- 2 of these events are happening in the next 2 days.
That’s powerful marketing!
So you see, there are many amazing reasons to use Facebook Events and to use them properly. We haven’t even begun to dive into the posibilities when it comes to combining Facebook Events with paid digital marketing campaigns on Facebook. That’s for another day perhaps.
Would you like a video of your entire show, filmed in glorious HD quality, to sell to your audience, free of charge? Get in touch with us right now! We are looking for clients that can quickly get over the “too good to be true” issue, because right now, that’s the biggest problem we have in our business! 🙂