If you’re planning a live event on Facebook, there’s a number of ways you can use Facebook marketing so that you can reach out to attendees, and keep in touch with them right up to the actual event. In fact, there are some features you can make use of to increase the visibility of your conference or live event before it happens, while it’s in progress, and even after the event has concluded. By using these features, you’ll be able to stay in constant contact with your audience, and answer any questions, and to increase the level of excitement and anticipation prior to your event.
Create a Facebook frame
With Facebook, you have the capability of uploading your own branded frame which you can then use in Facebook Stories. It can be timed so as to become active in your location at a specific time frame, and when event attendees open up their Facebook camera in order to create their own story, they will then have the capability of adding your event frame to their photo or video content.
It’s fairly easy to create a Facebook frame, with step one being that you have to navigate to www.facebook.com/frames/manage, and then clicking on Open Frame Studio. In this window, you have to make sure the correct Facebook page has been chosen, and then select Facebook Camera. Next, you have to click on Upload Art, and then choose the specific local file or event frame you want to use. Any graphics that you use must be in PNG format for best results.
After uploading, you will have to drag the graphic over to the specific position desired. When you’re satisfied with the layout you have, you simply click on Next. Then you have to give your frame a name and choose the menu selection labeled Only Available in Specific Location. Then you’ll have to zoom in on the provided map to show the precise location where your event will be held, and you can then drop a pin on the spot. You can then adjust the radius of the area which has been pinned, so as to zero in on those event participants who have signed up.
Next, you need to a planned range of dates for when you want the frame made available, and include a list of keywords which will help potential attendees find your event frame. When thinking of keywords, be sure to include the event name and location as well as your company brand. Now click Preview on Mobile, so that your frame’s preview can be sent to your mobile phone, where you can review it and make any changes which might be necessary.
Once you’re satisfied with how it looks, you can click on Publish, after which it will go through a brief review before being made available to everyone. After this, all you have to do is activate your frame and share a post including it to your Facebook page, and encourage as many people as possible to make use of it. If you can make your frame really fun and creative, you’ll have a much better chance of people engaging with it.
Create an event hashtag
When you’re creating a hashtag for your event, it’s best to develop something which is short and snappy so that it’s easy for potential attendees to remember and to type it in. It may be a good idea to create an abbreviation for your event name or your brand for this reason. It might also be a good idea to append the current year to the end of your tag if you intend to reactivate the hashtag for the same event next year.
You can encourage attendees to make use of your event hashtag in a number of ways, such as offering a discount or some other kind of incentive for anyone sharing content with your hashtag. You can also run a competition among attendees for the most inspirational photo from the event. You may also want to print your tag or create it physically in some other way so that a large number of people can interact with it.
If you don’t have a manager for your community, you can use a tool such as Keyhole for the purpose of monitoring how frequently your hashtag is used, and so that you can respond to content promptly. If you do have a community manager, try to make sure that he/she is available, so as to respond to and engage with shared content immediately.
Set up geo-targeting
It’s best if you can narrow your targeting to a precise location when you’re trying to reach mobile users during the event with Facebook video ads. The best way to go about this is to create a Facebook saved audience, and then drop in a pin on the specific location for your event. The object is to bring down the radius to as small an area as possible. Then you can use the exclude feature, so as to create an exclusion zone in the immediate area of your event.
For this, you can repeat the procedure of dropping pins, only this time for the purpose of removing some areas and creating a more confined geo-fence surrounding your event. At this point, it will be possible that you get a notification from Facebook telling you that you’ve made your audience too specific or small, but that’s not something you need to worry about. Now you can run some Facebook video ads to secure attention for your event, and to obtain a quick call to action from your event attendees.
Mobile placements are best because people who attend such events are generally away from their office desktops or their laptop machines, so mobile browsing is much more commonplace at such events. By using mobile placements, you maximize the opportunity of having your ad promoted to attendees at your event. You can use either vertical format videos or square format videos in your Facebook news feed, so as to ensure that your ads are not ignored by viewers.
Ideally, you should keep your videos to between 10 and 15 seconds, and you should try to pack as powerful a punch as you can in that limited duration. The whole point is to get the viewers’ attention and to generate maximum awareness for your event or the products and services you’re trying to call attention to. The time for using longer videos is later when you’re re-targeting some of your original viewers from the event.
