Here is part two of last weeks Facebook events guide. If you're still yet to check out the first part, feel free to head over to part one and get the full picture.
To quickly recap, there are a number of ways that marketing teams can use Facebook events, whether in house or from the perspective of a digital PR or social media agency. Across parts one and two of this article, a number of points for consideration are outlined, when it comes to making the most of Facebook's event functionality for pages.
Part one covered the imagery, when, what and where sections in detail, and part two will consider the next event input fields to consider, "More info" and invitations:
More info
This is a great opportunity to give the Facebook community in question something to get excited about. If there's very little information available, for example if it's a secret event, this section should reflect that, building up some buzz and letting imaginations go wild. If there's plenty of information that can be divulged, get it out there and give the invitees something to talk about.
Any relevant hyperlinks can also be included in this copy, so long as they're preceded by the customary http://; this can be hugely important in developing a clear call to action for users when the event comes around, and will direct them to the correct destination.
As mentioned above, it can be a good idea to add in the timings of the event across different timezones if the event is global. This could simply be in the form of a short list, detailing precise timings for different timezones across the globe. Again, it depends on the nature and audience of the event itself.
One final thing to consider is the way that this section ends. Users' are normally free to post comments within the event in the comment space below, and so it's worthwhile to leave a message to end the "More info" section that entices the viewer into leaving a comment, driving further interaction.
Invitations
Depending on the size of the Facebook community in question, I'd recommend different approaches to inviting users to the event:
If the community is modest in size, then the most effective way of inviting users is to send them individual invitations, which isn't too time consuming or difficult in this case. There is a clear call to action at the end of the event creation process to send invitations to users, and if the all option is selected, then invitations will be sent to all users of the page.
From experience, if the community is very large, Facebook's platform cannot process invitations on such a large scale. As such, it is a good idea to send invitations to all anyway, with a view to achieving as many invites as possible, and then supporting the event with wall posts, highlighting the event directly from users' news feeds. These posts can be created relatively easily; by embedding the event link in a Facebook post, the image from the event will be propagated along with the event details. This can be accompanied by a comment as per a usual post, which will create a good looking post for the wall. This can, of course, be done on multiple occasions, but it's better not to bombard the community.
In the above instance, it may also be worth considering sending individual invitations to the most influencial users within the community, for example those who would be considered brand ambassadors. This can potentially be a way of rewarding those users who give more to the community than they receive.
Overall, creating an event is a relatively simple task, but making it a major engagement vehicle that users are sure to want to interact with requires a few more tweaks. Hopefully the pointers in parts one and two of this piece will highlight the benefits of events within Facebook activity, since they're at present an underused tool.