10 Ways to Market Your Event on Facebook

This is a guest post by Facebook diva Sara Waller, you can follow her on twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Silent Dance viral event promoted via Facebook

Facebook Events is a free yet effective application that can be used to promote parties, marketing events, product launches and other significant happenings.

The format of the Event is similar to Facebook Groups – there are wall feature where invited members can post, discussion boards, photos, links and videos. Invited friends can be made admin officers in the event page which in turn gives them the opportunity to invite other people in their own networks.

Here are 10 tips for you:

1. Select your guest list

Remember to be appropriate. It´s no use sending out a London party invite to folk in Singapore.
Targeted. Relevant. Respectful.
Make sure you follow these 3 criteria when selecting your invitees. It also helps if you really know them, rather than some person you have never met or talked to. You are hovering dangerously close to spam if you invite your whole database.

2. Don´t go event crazy!

No one wants to receive a gazillion different invites every week. Easy cowboy. Keep events to one a month so you are not abusing this application or your friends’ ´patience!

3. Use a catchy headline

A high open rate and high response rate all depend on how you sell in the offer. If you´d like some help with writing catchy headlines check out this awesome presentation from Times Online Editor Tom Whitwell.
If your event includes a high profile celeb or venue make sure it´s featured in the subject title. You cannot change the title afterwards so maybe practice in draft first.
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15 Free Ebooks About Event Planning

Photo by libraryman via Flickr

A little bit more indulgence. Hard days of researching to bring you effective tools for your event planning business or career.

Download them on your PC, ipod, pda and read them. I am sure you will get inspired and remember that every little bit counts.

Management

1. Practical Project Management
2. Event Management Tips and Guidance for Success
3. A Project Management Primer or “a guide to making projects work (v2.0)”

Planning

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EventOrb unleashes Event Calendar

EventOrb is a nifty event marketing service that allows promoters to do a number of things such as:

- Create unlimited events
- Add photos from the event before or after it has taken place
- Add videos of the event
- Search for events all around the world by proximity, date, time of day or category

They recently re-launched their event calendar, a great service that allows promoters to push event marketing even further, let me quote from their blog:

….So we decided to take our event calendar to the next level by allowing you to create a concise version of an event and even upload a flyer – all of this, without leaving the calendar page. When you’re done, “presto”, your event magically appears on the calendar.

Have a look and tell me what you think.

Link to Event Calendar – EventOrb

Why I like CitySocialising.com

CitySocialising is a great local service to help beating the personal barriers that prevent you from getting a better job, improving your social life, being active. Apart from that, it is an awesome threat to traditional event professionals.

Jo is organising Sunday lunch Hampstead and walk and has invited you to attend.

Graham is organising 18-20s west end drinks! and has invited you to attend.

Kelly is organising Cocktail tasting class and has invited you to attend.

I don’t know who Jo, Graham or Kelly are but hey, these events are cool! Usually these kind of mail makes it very quickly to my Spam folder but in this instance I just can’t do it. The events are very relevant, targeted on my area and to my needs. What if I’ll get a special invitation tomorrow to an unmissable event?

What is it?
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Free is the new black

Photo by kalandrakas

The horrible economic trends as well as the impressive movement of user generated events is challenging the traditional scheme of paid events.

If you charge for your events you may soon be in real trouble. If you charge a lot for your events you are probably already facing tough challenges.

The Economy

Pretty straight forward. There are not enough money to be spent on events as before. Companies buying tickets for your conferences are now hesitating on such expenditure. There is simply not the disposable income there used to be. As simple as that.

The Technology

Online meetings are now preferred to conferences. Linkedin/Xing is now preferred to your 3000£/$/€ networking event.

User Generated Events

Meetups, BarCamps, unconferences and the like are now offering free alternatives to your paid events. Getting together a location and asking people to pay for their drinks is now accepted. Nobody wants to mix any more with sponsors, stalls, banners and so forth. Meetups are run by users and most of them are not sponsored. The conventional infrastructure around events is shaking.

Scarcity

You cannot rely any more on scarcity.

I don’t have to wait for big exhibitions to come along in order to network with top professionals. It’s all coming to my city and for free, possibly on a monthly basis.

Now, how do you deal with that? How do you compete with free, zero, nada, niet, niente?

Innovate

You will soon realize that if you manage events conventionally, the demand will drop sensibly.

Few tips.

If you use social media and social networks, if you know what twitter is, if you integrate sponsors gently and wisely, you will definitely find new ways to engage and make a profit.

If you think this is not going to happen and you feel safe where you are, start reading another blog!

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