How to Use Facebook's Event Application
to Promote Events

One of the most powerful ways to promote your event is by using social networking sites. This month, I'll explain how to use the "Events" application in Facebook. It's a wonderful way to let all your Facebook friends know about your live events like speaking engagements, book signings, workshops, conferences and classes, or viral events like teleseminars and webinars. 

On your Facebook home page, look on the right side of the screen in the "Applications" box.

Next, list all the details of your event in the form that appears on the screen. 

You're not done yet! Facebook will now give you the option of emailing the invitations to a select group of your friends, or all of them. If you have thousands of friends, that's a time-consuming chore. But it's worth it.

Here's an example that shows how those invitations have actually generated revenue for a paid teleseminar I hosted. In October last year, I scheduled a teleseminar on "How to Use Twitter to Amass an Army of Followers, Customers & Valuable Contacts--and Promote." 

Several days before the session, I created an event on Facebook called "How to Promote on Twitter" because I wanted my friends to know about it. At the time, I had more than 1,500 Facebook friends. My assistant, Christine Buffaloe, spent more than an hour emailing all my friends to let them know about the event. Facebook lets you invite only 100 friends at a time, which can be tedious. 

But it was well worth the effort. When one of my Facebook friends, Adam Urbanski, the Marketing Mentor, got the invitation, he RSVP'd:

I haven't seen Adam in several years, so I went to his Facebook page and noticed he's a pretty popular guy because he has more than 3,500 friends.  And there on his wall was a one-liner, letting all his friends know he had written on my wall for the Twitter teleseminar event:

The link to "How to Use Twitter to Promote" by the way, is a hyperlink. His friends could click on it, read my invitation and, if they wished, register. As soon as Christine emailed my invitation, I received more than a dozen registrations for the teleseminar at $77 each. That's about $924 in revenue, just from sending one invitation. 

Granted, the topic is hot right now, and lots of Twitterers want to know how to use the site to promote instead of posting lame tweets about what they had for lunch. But emailing invitation and receiving RSVPs results in hundreds more eyes reading your invitation and even more mutual friends seeing the topic. 

I'm guessing that some of those registrations came directly from my Facebook friends who saw my invitation. I also suspect some of the registrations came from my friends' friends who saw the RSVP on the walls of our mutual friends.

---The title of the event is boring.  Events with titles that explain the value or benefit of attending will probably get far greater response than events that have titles that don't communicate value.

---The sales page for your event doesn't promise value. You must convince people who are paying for a seat at your event that it will be worth their time and money, particularly if they also have to pay for airfare, a hotel and meals on the road.

---Maybe you don't RSVP to your friends' Faceboook event invitations. The only time your friends hear from you is when you have something to promote.  Remember that social networking is, first and foremost, about joining the conversation.  Only after you've joined the conversation can you promote.

---You don't have enough friends yet on Facebook who are willing to RSVP to your events, so that the one-liner above, outlined in red, shows up on their walls. Be patient. Continue inviting people in your target audience to be your Facebook friends. Your list of friends will grow quicker than you realize.

---You aren't taking the time to reply to the direct messages that your friends send you on Facebook. When I first started using Facebook, I made the mistake of letting several hundred messages accumulate in my Facebook inbox before I went through them one by one and replied. Two of them were invitations to be a guest speaker on other people's teleseminars.

During the teleseminar I hosted last summer on How to Use Facebook to Promote Your Business or Nonprofit, my guest expert, Jason Alba, discussed the importance of RSVPing to events and writing on your friends' walls. He offered an entire step-by-step timeline that explains how to use Facebook to fill seats at your event or promote whatever you're selling. 

Now that you know about the power of using the Events application in Facebook, identify your next event, and make a note to yourself to add this powerful tool to your publicity campaign.