Managing your Event on Facebook

What is a Facebook Event?

Setting up a Facebook Event from your Page makes it easy for people to find your upcoming races. To promote your races you should be cashing in on social currency to spread the word and help you sell tickets. Facebook is an ideal platform for this, allowing you to set up your own (free of charge) event page from your business profile. An event will be public and discoverable by anyone on, or off, of Facebook. It will show the date, time and location, as well as how many people have clicked ‘attending’ or ‘interested’ to your event. 

Here are some of the benefits of setting up a facebook event:

• To increase awareness of your race. Your event can highlight to you how many people are ‘going’ or are ‘interested’ in your event, helping you track the potential of your RSVPs.
• Increasing your ticket sales. By linking your tickets to your event you can drive more traffic to your event pages. 
• Reaching a larger audience. When someone clicks ‘attending’ or ‘interested’ it will appear on their friends’ timeline giving you organic reach. With Facebook Ads you can also interest more athletes like the ones already attending! 
• Increasing the attendance of your participants. Keeping people updated on your event is important and your event can help you do this. This can reduce the number of no-shows to your races, bettering their experience and having the potential to entice them back.
• Building a stronger community around your brand. Your event is a good place for people to ask questions and for you to post updates, giving it a more personal feel to your event journey.  

But it’s not as simple as creating the event and sitting back to watch your tickets sell out. Learning to promote an event on Facebook effectively is key to any buzz being generated and registrations increased.

Creating your Facebook event

Here is how to create your event:

1. Open your business page on Facebook
2. On the menu on the left, select ‘Events’, then click ‘Create Event’ 
3. Add all of your details such as the event name, location, time, description and cover photo. 
4. Under category, the most common for races is to select ‘Sports’ 
5. Under Co-Hosts, you can add Eventrac to increase your visibility by having it appear on our page too
6. Add a link to your ticketing page 
7. Click publish, and share it to your page so that it has a higher chance of being seen by your Facebook followers

Looks are everything...

Your event needs a good cover photo. This says a lot about your event, and the fruitfulness of any Ad Campaigns you want to run to promote your event will live or die with a good picture or video.

Take time to set it up well! Choose a cover photo that’s 1920x1080 pixels. You want to reflect some of the excitement of your event through your cover photo, so make sure it's eye-catching while keeping it slick without too much text or infographics in the way. Remember, 54% of users only use facebook on mobile. So make sure it's compatible! 

You can also use videos here, such as a flashback video of last years race or a promotional style clip. In both cases, for photos or videos, make sure you upload high-quality content for your event cover.

Describing your Event

Your event title will be at the top of what a potential participant sees. Remember to make sure this is informative while keeping it short, sweet and to the point. Your description should include all the information you want interested participants to have access to before buying a ticket. Include your key selling points, such as:

1. Ticket Price 
2. What is included with your ticket? Medal/T-shirt/Goodie Bag
3. An overview of the route terrain and distance. Here you can link to your Eventrac page to showcase the events route map.
4. What level of support is provided during the race
5. What makes your race special

Underneath these can go other information, which will be more useful to people who are already signed up to your event, and might check back on the facebook event for more details later down the line:

1. Registration details (Are you sending out bib numbers or collection on the day)
2. Transport options to your event
3. Parking information
4. Toilets available
5. Food and drinks 

For more on communicating effectively with your participants, see our ‘Guide to Event Communications’

Make your events are center of attention

Make sure your events are at the forefront of your facebook page:

1. Go to your Page and click Settings.
2. Click Templates and Tabs in the left column
3. Move 'Events' up to the top

Make sure you check “Publish New Events to Timeline” within your “Event” tab, so your followers know when you've added a new race.

Here you can see how Tough Mudder has done this, listing their events on Facebook with good visibility:

 

Event notifications- Don’t over post!

Attendees to your events will get notified about updates to your event, depending on what notification settings they have chosen for it. Updating your attendees is useful and can help promote your event, but you should avoid spamming them with information. 

According to Facebook’s own research, events that send more than a few notifications experience considerable audience disengagement, as people turn notifications off when they find them to be annoying. So try not to post uninformative or un-engaging information which could lead them to unsubscribe to alerts about your event.

People are swamped with information through social media so event directors need to find a good balance between getting the word out and annoying people. Basically, do not post on your event wall with a daily countdown. A better way to get attention is to start some interesting discussions on the wall to get people talking. If people are bouncing comments around, your Facebook Event is doing its job and engaging participants. That makes you less spammy and displays the genuine interest in your race.

Cross-Promote with Event Co-Hosts 

Facebook allows an event to be hosted by more than one person or page.  This can be a great way to get your event in-front of larger audiences. By adding another co-host, you will instantly benefit from the exposure of anyone following their page.

Adding other 'hosts' like Eventrac to your event allows other companies to add the event to their own facebook events module and tab.  We suggest asking any of your sponsors or suppliers if they would be happy to become a co-host of the event.

Promote your Facebook event OFF Facebook

When emailing your participants, you can include links for them to RSVP to your events. When they click attending it will show up on other users newsfeeds and help spread the word. 

Another way of promoting your facebook event growth is through the QR code function. If you have any leaflets or posters that you are giving out to clubs, you can include a code on the front or back for them scan with their phones, which will take them directly to your event. 

To generate the code, go to your facebook event, and click on the (...) on the top right next to the edit button, and click ‘Create QR Code’. 

Promoting your Event ON Facebook

To expand your reach, Facebook Ads can help you go further afield and find more interested participants generating more interest in your facebook event. 

You can create an Ad for this directly from your event page with one of the following 2 options; get more responses, or sell more tickets. 

‘Get More Responses’ will get more people to respond to your Facebook event, by showing an Interested button to people who see your ad. This is more useful nearer the start of your event, when you’re trying to generate interest amongst participants.

‘Sell More Tickets’ will show a Get Tickets button to people who see your ad. The objective here is to direct people off of Facebook and on to your website to purchase tickets.This is more useful closer to the date of your event once you’ve already generated some interest. 

For more detail on creating Facebook Ads, see our guide on Using Facebook Ads for your Event.