Once you’ve planned and set up your event, you need to attract people to register for the event and attend. To make your event successful and profitable, you need to focus on boosting attendance.
A great way of doing this is with the help of one of the most popular social media platforms, Facebook.
Facebook has over 2.7 billion users and is the perfect platform for getting the word out about your event. With so many users on the platform, you have a higher chance of getting people to register for and attend your event.
With this in mind, in this article, we’ll go over some of the best ways to boost attendance with Facebook.
Article Outline
Boosting Event Attendance with Facebook
Here’s our advice on how you can use Facebook’s intuitive event marketing features and tools to promote your event and boost attendance.
#1. Create your Facebook Events Page
If you’re considering using Facebook to boost event attendance, creating a Facebook events page is the first step. Your Facebook event page’s success will depend on how well you set it up. A good Facebook events page can grab the attention of more people than one that’s poorly executed.
Your cover photo on your Facebook events page should be 1920×1080 pixels. This will ensure it fits perfectly on visitor’s screens. Choosing a sweet and short name is also important in grabbing people’s attention right away.
For instance, if you’re hosting a live concert event, naming your Facebook events page “The Best Rock n’ Roll Concert by the Soda Preachers” is too wordy and hard to remember. Instead, naming it something like “Rock n’ Roll Festival” or “Rock n’ Roll Night” is catchy and will grab the attention of more people, even people who don’t know the band.
Facebook has an algorithm that shows ads to users based on their activity. It decides which posts users see on their feed and what order they’re presented in. The ranking signals include relationship, content type, popularity, and recency.
Event organizers need to make sure they add valid and up-to-date information regarding the event to their page to boost attendance with Facebook.
Additionally, choosing your event category is also important for your Facebook event marketing campaign. You can choose from popular categories such as conference, festival, meet-up, or concert.
Once you’re done creating and setting up your Facebook events page, you can give out bits of information to event attendees about your event by sending notifications.
Pro tip: Make sure you don’t overwhelm your attendees with notifications so they don’t turn notifications off.
One way to capture people’s attention is by giving them a sneak peek of the final product which in this case is your event. This sparks the interest of new visitors and encourages them to register for your event to experience the event for themselves.
Giving event attendees an inside look at what goes behind the scenes can prove to be a great content idea. By providing pre-event content (such as speaker interviews or downloadable guides) for your registered event attendees, you boost engagement and also attract many new people to your event.
For this, you can use Facebook live video to stream clips before and after your event. This is a great way to get the word out about your event, increase engagement on your Facebook events page, and also boost event attendance.
#3. Use Facebook Advertising
Facebook offers a great event marketing platform that can help you gain new attendees. Other than designing your Facebook event marketing campaign with mobile users in mind, you can use six different types of formats in your Facebook ads.
Depending on your content, you can use ad formats such as photo, video, carousel, slideshow, or messenger.
Facebook let’s event organizers use three main advertising functions to promote their event:
- Ads to collect responses. Facebook allows you to use an “Interested” button on the ad. This means that people who will click on this button are signing up to attend your event but not actually registering for it. You can later use targeted ads for those people to further spark their interest in your event so that they end up registering for it.
- Ads to drive event registrations. This kind of ad is similar to the last one, but instead of using the “Interested” button, organizers can use the “Purchase Pass” or “Buy Tickets” button to add a link to the event website. This will help make people make their decision faster and motivate them to register for your event quickly.
- Facebook Ads Manager & Power Editor. Organizers can use Facebook’s functionality to enhance their Facebook event marketing campaign. The Facebook Ads Manager and Power Editor lets you target a specific audience with ads. For instance, you can use retargeting ads to get your message in front of people who visited your event website. Since the users are already interested in your content, pushing them to register for your event is the right direction moving forward.
You can also use ads based on demographic information. This means that you can target an audience using demographic filters that include age, gender, interests, and location. With Facebook Lookalike targeting, you can find people in the same demographic directly from your email list. Just upload your list of email addresses and let Facebook find similar people to your attendees.
#4. Integrate With other Social Media Platforms
You can use other social media platforms to further spread your content and make your Facebook event marketing strategy much more effective. Since Facebook integrates with the popular social media platform Instagram, sharing images and videos there can help attract a whole different set of audiences for your event.
There’s a chance that many people who might be interested in attending your event may only use Instagram and not Facebook. This allows people to use their social media platform of choice to learn about your event, view content, and register for your event. Additionally, this also makes it easier for people to find you and your event which can help you boost attendance.
Conclusion
With the right Facebook event marketing strategy, you can boost engagement and attendance for your next event. We shared our best tip on how to boost attendance with Facebook and, hopefully, you’re in a good position now to take the next steps.
Ready to start organizing successful events? Try the Event Espresso demo today!