How to Use Facebook to Boost Event Attendance

Facebook marketing is a great way to promote your event. Critical to create and build a dynamic business Page or Fan page (personal) for your company – meaning, you have to do some front end investing in your Facebook account(s) to leverage for event promotion.

Fan Page vs. Business Page

There are significant trade offs for Fan page versus a business page; the former has much more functionality but it’s “personal” and may not be the best way to build a brand for your business. But, if you and your staff have personal Fan pages you can blend your Facebook marketing to promote conference app that encompass both personal and business pages. Be forewarned, it can take much longer to build an audience of fans for a business page – requiring front end investment to build followers.

Don’t forget to “like” other business pages and “friend” fan pages of event companies or individuals who may be attendees or sponsors. Connections and engagement (recognizing those that “like” your page as an example) on Facebook help to build a “virtual community” – the more connections you have (as long as they are targeted) the more “reach” your messages will have via Facebook.

Leveraging Facebook for Front End Registration

We would recommend using status updates and promoted posts to drive front end registration for your event. Start marketing the event on Facebook 2-4 weeks ahead of your event and you might want to offer some kind of incentive in the updates and promoted events to drive a sense of urgency with your attendees.

You want to post the registration on a reoccurring basis but you don’t want to promote it so heavily that you turn off your Fans with boring repetitious “ads” for an event. If possible, try to create some kind of viral component for your event. Giving discounts to groups of people and compensating them by sharing the event planning app an individual for referring some number of her/his friends to register for your event.

Think Visual when Marketing on Facebook

Facebook is a visual platform – the vast majority of updates have some type of image associated with them. So, develop a high quality graphic to use on Facebook and your other social networks and don’t forget about adding this image to your Pinterest account and cross promoting via Twitter. You can make sure your mobile event app has links to share the images and videos.

Your graphic should be visually appealing and should incorporate the event information; i.e. date, time, web site, phone, location, hashtag for the event. Don’t just link to your home page in the graphic – link right to your registration page so your attendees can register easily.

Facebook is also a great place to post photos that are happening in real time (Twitter too) – make sure you use the hashtag associated with your event. Your attendees will enjoy seeing photos of themselves and the overall event – so, create an album of all pictures taken during the event and upload these to your primary Facebook account.

And, if you’ve taken videos during the event don’t forget to upload these to a YouTube account. Share these by pointing to them in a status update on Facebook and your Twitter account. And, you can and should also upload these videos or any images that you have taken during the event to a Pinterest Board that reflects the name of the event. Use your event app to make sure nothing is missed. You can then share the Board via your Facebook and Twitter accounts – which will drive post event engagement with your attendees!