As an event organizer, you probably use social media marketing to advertise your events and attract more attendees. Facebook, for example, offers a variety of free tools – such as Facebook Pages, Events, and Groups – that you can use to increase your event outreach and potentially gain more revenue with increased event registrations and bookings.
In this article, we’ll share some actionable tips that will help you fully utilize free Facebook marketing to improve your event planning efforts, connect with your target audience, and sell more tickets.
Why Is Facebook Marketing Important?
As an event organizer, you probably understand how important social media marketing is for increasing customer outreach and growing your event business.
In fact, Facebook had 2.5 billion monthly active users in 2019, which accounted for around 74% of Facebook users visiting the site daily. This means that with Facebook marketing, you have a surefire way of connecting with prospective attendees and getting better results.
However, to actually convert social followers into paying attendees, you need to effectively use Facebook’s platform. According to a recent study, 1.4 billion people use Facebook Groups which is a great tool for finding and interacting with prospective attendees, as well as sponsors.
How to Use Free Facebook Marketing to Boost Ticket Sales
Here are three of the most popular Facebook marketing tools that you can use to increase event registrations and boost ticket sales.
Facebook Events
A Facebook Event allows event organizers send invitations to attendees, facilitate commenting, and generate pre-event hype.
What are Facebook Events
Facebook Events has over 650 million active users, more than 47 million public events, and over 35 million events viewed every day. Facebook users can create calendar-based invites and send Facebook events to selected groups of people.
Using Facebook Events, you can create a group for your event and include important event details in invites such as the date and time of the event and related images.
Facebook Events Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Facebook Events lets you easily send invites and serves as a central hub for answering event-related questions.
- Setting up Facebook Events is quick and easy.
- If you organize free events, you can keep track of RSVPs to see who is attending your event and who isn’t.
- Facebook Events is a great platform for sharing event photos and videos.
Cons:
- Facebook Events can be difficult to find on Facebook which means your prospective attendees might have a hard time finding them organically.
- Event pages don’t do well for paid events as RSVP numbers on Facebook can be different from what ticket sales show.
- When you rely solely on Facebook to plan your events, you will leave out people who don’t use Facebook.
Getting Started With Facebook Events
For starters, it’s important to post your event website’s link in the Ticket URL field. This way, your event page will display a Tickets button which allows people to easily purchase tickets from your event website. If you’re an Event Smart user, you can copy and paste the event URL from your website directly into the Ticket URL field.
Here’s another quick tip: send out invites to everyone you know on Facebook. This helps you generate buzz around your upcoming event and maximize event outreach.
When people mark events as Attending and Invited, they’ll receive updates through Facebook whenever you share a new post on your event page. Event Smart lets you invite pre-registered guests to your Facebook event.
In addition to this, you can choose to make your event public or private. Setting it to Public means that all Facebook users can view the event (even if you’re not friends with them). Similarly, if you only want invitees to see the event, you can make your event Private.
Facebook Pages
Facebook Pages allow page owners to host events, add a cover photo, share stories, post reviews, and more.
What are Facebook Pages
Facebook Pages is another popular free Facebook marketing feature that enables businesses, public figures, organizations, and other entities to build an authentic and public online presence on Facebook. These pages have fans (not friends) which means that Facebook users who “like” a Page will see the page’s updates in their News Feed.
Facebook Pages Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Facebook Pages let you gather useful insights and promote your events. These features are not available in Facebook Groups.
- You can use Facebook Pages to establish two-way communication with your fans. This makes it perfect for organizations that want to reach out to large groups of people.
- Facebook users can become fans simply by “liking” your event page.
- Facebook Messenger for Pages enables you to offer quick, one-on-one customer service while maintaining a record of conversations.
Cons:
- Facebook Pages is mainly an advertising and broadcasting tool. You can expect to invest some money for promoting your content.
- Once you create a Facebook Page, you’ll have to create content and interact with your audience regularly.
Getting Started With Facebook Pages
Facebook Pages for events make it easy to organize an event more than once. When you create a Facebook page, simply call it the name of your event without specifying the year.
You should add fun and interactive event-related content to your Facebook Page. Use visual media such as live streaming, photos, and video to increase user engagement and connect with your audience.
You can also boost your audience outreach by adding Facebook widgets and links to your Facebook Page. For example, you can use your Facebook Page to promote your Event Smart registration page, event gallery, blog posts, or press releases.
As an event organizer, you should engage with other Facebook Pages and your fans regularly by commenting on posts, sharing related content, and participating in discussions. This way, you can build long-term relationships with your fans and reach out to other industry professionals such as speakers, sponsors, and vendors.
Facebook Groups
Facebook Groups offer a platform for people to discuss common interests and share their opinion.
What are Facebook Groups
Facebook Groups are great for small group communications and discussions. Group members can ask and answer questions, create event listings, and follow discussions. In addition to this, groups let you send mass messages straight to the members’ inbox. You can choose to make your group public (allow anyone to join) or private (join by invitation only).
Facebook Groups Pros and Cons
Pros:
- You can discuss different event-related topics on Facebook Groups and grow your online community.
- Participation is voluntary so only those people who are interested will take part in discussions.
- Facebook Groups lets all members of the group communicate with each other.
Cons:
- Unlike Facebook Pages, Groups doesn’t let you connect any additional apps for advertising or aesthetics.
- Facebook Groups don’t offer insights. This means that businesses won’t be able to keep track of their campaign’s performance.
- Facebook Groups can be difficult to find organically through search.
Getting Started With Facebook Groups
You can create a Facebook group to share event-related content and facilitate conversations around your event. This is a great way to promote your event. To take things a step further, you can share links to your event website for additional details.
That said, you shouldn’t promote your business or your event in groups. People join these groups to ask questions and find solutions to their problems. For this reason, you should avoid posting any spam links.
Bonus: How to Embed an Event Smart Ticket Selector in a Facebook Page
While it’s pretty common to see businesses investing resources into Facebook marketing, it’s equally important to integrate these tools with your event website.
Here’s a quick, step-by-step tutorial that’ll show you how to embed an Event Smart ticket selector on a Facebook Page.
Step #1: Get your ticket selector embed code
Navigate to the Event Smart event editor and click on the “Embed” tab.
Next, copy the iframe code from the modal popup textbox.
Step #2: Add iframe app to your Facebook Page
Head over to your Facebook page and enter “Static HTML: iframe tabs” in the search bar or go to this direct link https://apps.facebook.com/static_html_plus
From there, click on the “Add Static HTML to a Page” button. Select your Facebook page to add the iframe tab to and click on the “Add Page Tab” button.
Step #3: Add the ticket selector to your Facebook page
Head over to your Facebook page and look for the custom iframe app you just installed. It should be under the “More” tab:
Click the “Edit Tab” button to add content to the Page Tab. You will see two options for displaying your form on your Facebook page.
You can choose to make your content available for everyone (Public Content), or show it only to your Facebook fans, or to people who like your Facebook page. When you’re done, click on the “Save & Publish” button to proceed.
Use Free Facebook Marketing to Boost Event Ticket Sales
By using different free Facebook marketing tools, you’ll be able to increase your event outreach, engage with prospective attendees, and boost ticket sales. We shared some actionable tips on how to get started with free Facebook marketing and, hopefully, you’re in a good position now to take the next steps.
What event marketing strategies do you use to boost your event registrations? Let us know in the comments below.
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