Here's a guest post from Josh Marx, director of marketing with American Meetings Inc. It's a handy little step-by-step guide to promoting an event on Facebook. Take it away, Josh!
With social media being the buzz of today and gaining moment everyday, it is smart to get on the “Bandwagon” and use these platforms to your company’s advantage. Social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, are providing such a broad area to connect with people and other companies, it makes it a perfect platform to share real-time information and promote your events.
Facebook, for example, has over 800 million users and is said to have over 1 billion accounts by August 2012! On no other platform can you reach so many people. This makes Facebook a perfect forum to promote events, conferences, meetings, and any other functions that your company is organizing. With your friends and colleagues already on your Facebook page, it makes these people and their friends much easier to reach. The following steps will show you how to set up an events page and promote an event.
Login to your personal account, then click on the “Events” link on the left hand side of the page (if for some reason the “Events” link is not there, click on “Edit Page”. Then, click on “Apps” and then “Events. After that you click on “Go To App”.
Now you click on the “Create Event” button. You can now fill any information that you wish in this area. You can also upload an image that promotes the event.
At this point you can promote your event by clicking on “Invite Guests”. Now you will need to go through your friends list and manually invite the people you want.
If you would like to further promote your event, you can post it periodically to your wall on Facebook with a link to your events page. You can also send this link to friends and ask them to share it also. Remember, for every person that is your friend, there are 150 people that are in your network. This means that all these people can view the information that is posted on your friend’s walls and news feeds.
The event feature on Facebook would be excellent for also promoting other meetings, trade shows, and even international conferences. Facebook is the number one most visited site in the world; so don’t let your opportunity go by to promote you next event.
Sue here again. So what are your best tips for promoting events using social media? I always worry about crossing the line between offering useful information about something people will want to know about and being one of those LinkedIn or Facebook spammers who offer nothing but marketing messages wherever they go. So I guess my biggest tip would be to follow the 90/10 rule, where 90 percent of what you post is just useful stuff and just 10 promotes your stuff (or is it 80/20? Best to err on the conservative side).