ISES Denver

Blog entry

Five Ways and a Few Tips on How to Use Facebook to Promote Your Meeting or Event

posted Friday, September 24th, 2010 by Ashley Sostaric

We all know that Facebook has been proclaimed the world’s most powerful online social network. How can you harness the sheer power of this application to enhance your next meeting or event? Here are five ways, along with a few quick tips, to maximize all of the power that a Facebook Fan Page has to offer…

Article source: Colorado Meetings & Events Magazine

1) Increasing Your Online Footprint
By having a Fan Page for your event, you immediately create another online outlet to help extend your reach on search engines. This broadens your online footprint by helping develop sustainable content that will live long, and be linked to, on sites like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Tip: Be sure not to forget to create your unique user name after your Fan Page reaches 25 “Likes”. This gives you a distinct identity and allows you to easily use the URL for promo, ie: www.facebook.com/NameofYourEvent

2) Creating Engagement
It is much easier to get a potential or confirmed attendee to engage with your event via Facebook than on your web site or blog. It just takes one quick click for them to “Like” the page. No long form or well-thought-out response is needed to participate, just a click of the mouse. And with that click, your content will be added to their News Feed. The perfect opportunity to supply them with ongoing information and content that is relevant to the event.

Tip: Be sure to feature interesting event content that relates to activities, speakers and the location – at the destination and property level. Position your posts to inform, but also add in questions to produce responses and encourage interaction.

3) Collecting Data
After a person “Likes” a page, you receive a complete profile of data – including gender, age and location of the person. You can also see where users came from in terms of referring sites and what content they were most interested in on your page. Great information to utilize when generating your next targeted marketing campaign.

Tip: Promote your event with Facebook Ads. Use your demographic data, keywords and/or other “Likes” to target your audience. When developing your ad, include as much primary data about the event as possible, so the potential attendees can make a decision of interest in the impression stage--not just the click through.

Check out the rest of the article at: http://meetingsmags.com/article/five-ways-and-few-tips-how-use-facebook-promote-your-meeting-or-event