This is lesson 2 in the ‘Marketing your Quicket Event’ course.
Click here to go back to the first lesson or click here to skip to the next lesson.
Welcome to lesson 2 of our ‘Marketing your Quicket event’ course. At the end of this 10-part course you’ll have all the tools you need to market your event effectively, ensuring you have as many ticket sales as possible.
This lesson covers:
You may think that the general social media movement is towards Instagram, but when it comes to events - think again.
Facebook is still the number one place that traffic for event ticket sales comes from, and Facebook itself has a focus on being an events discovery platform.
This lesson will walk you through what you need to set up on Facebook. If you already have a lot that has been set up, this lesson will serve as a reference to check that you’ve covered all your bases. It will also walk you through how to build an audience, and the best (and most effective) practices for marketing events specifically on the platform.
So what do you need to set up on Facebook?
- A Facebook page for your event brand
- An event page for your event(s) housed on your Facebook page
Tip: If you already have a Facebook page (and even events added to it), great! The rest of this lesson has information that is just as relevant to you, so we’d still recommend working through it.
Why do I need these?
Lesson 2: Social Media Building Blocks (Facebook for your events) - Section 1
Your Facebook page
Before you can upload your event to Facebook, you will need a Facebook brand page to house it. This is different to your personal profile on Facebook, and acts as a professional profile for your event brand. It houses general info about your events, contact details, photos, and various content for your ticket buyers to engage with - whether they are potential customers, or people who have already booked to your event.
Perhaps you’ve uploaded events to Facebook in the past but have done so from your personal profile. Continuing to do so will limit the reach of your event drastically. The following are just a few reasons to create a brand page:
- A Facebook page is often a stamp of legitimacy in many cases.
- A lot of people look up brands on Facebook to find information on how to contact them.
- It gives your target audience one place to see all your events, including historical ones that you’ve run which adds to your brand image and makes things easy for your potential ticket buyers.
- You’ll be able to reach people that you don’t know personally (whereas on your personal profile you’ll be relying solely on your Facebook friends to spread the word about your event).
- You can run paid ads to reach a very specific audience, and make the most of your marketing budget (rather than throwing the net out wide).
Regardless of how you’ve done it before, we highly recommend that you create a Facebook page rather than just using your personal profile.
Your event page on your Facebook page
Once you have a Facebook page, you can upload your event to your page. This is different to your event page on Quicket - but is just as crucial.
Your Facebook event page is the main place where your potential attendees express their interest in attending and where they engage with the content of your event, and where they find how to book those tickets.
The following are just a few reasons to create an event page on your Facebook page:
- Your Facebook event page is one of the main sources of where traffic to your Quicket event page comes from.
- Even if someone only indicates “interested” for your event on Facebook, it gets added to their event calendars. This means that as it gets closer to your event, they’ll be reminded about it and are more likely to consider booking tickets if they haven’t done so already.
- They’ll also be made aware of content you post to the event, which is helpful as a reminder if they’ve forgotten that they want to book tickets, or if any of the new content you post is a drawcard that sells them on booking tickets.
- People can invite their friends to your event, which increases your event’s reach. People are also more likely to attend something if they can see that their friends are attending which Facebook makes visible very well.
As you can see, running your event on Facebook through your brand page rather than your personal profile is a no-brainer.
In the rest of this lesson we’ll give your required images and the setup of your pages their own sections because we’d rather you set it up properly and professionally - but it’s easy as pie to create a page and an event on Facebook.
Images you’ll need
Lesson 2: Social Media Building Blocks (Facebook for your events) - Section 2
Before you set anything up - first things first. There are some images you will need for your Facebook brand and event pages. Technically, you don’t need these images to go ahead, so feel free to skip ahead and come back to this section, but we recommended that you have a solid, continuous look and feel for your event(s) and your event brand from the get-go.
To start, you will need both a profile image and a cover image for your brand page, as well as a cover image for your event page.
You will also need images for content that you will post, but we’ll go through these later on.
It’s a good idea to prep all these images together with all the other image content you need for your event (like your Quicket profile image which we covered in our Event Starter Course), and to make sure your images are the correct format, resolution and dimensions for Facebook.
Although Facebook technically allows images of varying formats and dimensions, it’s important to follow the ideal image specs from Facebook for two reasons:
- To make sure that your images are of good quality and are not pixellated.
- Because Facebook crops your images differently depending where they’re being displayed (i.e. desktop or mobile). Optimizing your Facebook content for mobile is non-negotiable.
IMAGE GUIDELINES
For all your digital images for Facebook, our image guidelines from our Event Starter Course all apply in terms of consistency, design, file size and context.
IMAGE SPECS
We’ve broken the specs down per required image for you in our Image Specification Cheat Sheet. Click here to check what the dimensions for these images need to be. If you’re working with a designer, as we recommend, you don’t necessarily need to understand these required specs, but do pass them on to your designer.
Tip: To learn what pixels, DPI and KB are, click here to break off to our bonus lesson about Image Sizing from our Event Starter Course.
Your Facebook page & audience
Lesson 2: Social Media Building Blocks (Facebook for your events) - Section 3
In addition to your event brand's email address(es) and contact number(s), you'll need a name for each page that you're setting up - whether that's based on your event brand, or the brand that runs multiple different events. Remember that consistency in branding is key!
Also prep a to-the-point but thorough and engaging description of your event brand for the ‘About’ section of your page, including a mention of your event, relevant keywords, and links to your other social media pages here.
You'll also need to decide on what you want people to do on your page. This can be referred to as a call-to-action.
People need to be told what to do - and it’s more effective to ask them to only do one thing, so decide what that is. Since you want them to book tickets to your event, using Facebook’s call-to-action feature to direct them to your event page* on Quicket is crucial. The feature creates a button that’s one of the first visible things that someone will see when they land on your Facebook page. Once you’ve got it set up, clicking on it will take them directly to book tickets.
*Even if you have a website which links to your Quicket event page, we still recommend using the link to your Quicket event page here to give people the shortest route to buy tickets.
- Create a username for your page. Beneath your page name, click ‘Create @username’ and set yours. But! be very selective with this - you may want to wait until you’ve set up all your profiles after the next lesson before you do this as it's better for these to be the same across platforms, making it easier to remember.
- Start by inviting all your Facebook friends to like your page.
- People respond best to in-person requests, though, so send a WhatsApp message to your friends with the link to your Facebook page, telling them that you’ve created a Facebook page for your events, and it would help a lot if they would be so kind as to like it. You can send a broadcast message on WhatsApp which is great as you can select the list of people you want to send it to, and it’s received as they would receive a direct message from you.
- Also post about it on your personal timeline and tag your page so people know where to like it.
- If you’ve run past events, start posting content to your page about them. (We cover this in more detail later in this course.) Photos are king here - humans are incredibly visual creatures. Ask people who have attended past events to send you their content to share. Post twice a day - you're not at risk of over-posting or losing fans, since Facebook itself limits the amount of people who see your content (unless you pay to boost your posts).
- You can also run a paid campaign to extend the reach of your page (we touch on this in lesson 10).
Your event page on your Facebook Page
Lesson 2: Social Media Building Blocks (Facebook for your events) - Section 4
So you’ve got your your event page cover image from this earlier section and your Facebook page is all set up - now let’s set up your event on that page.
If you’ve set up your event on Quicket already, you should already have all the information needed to create your event on Facebook. These include: your event event details such as the event name, dates, times, location, description, category, etc.
You can simply copy the relevant info from your event on Quicket and paste it in when you create your event on Facebook. Facebook will automatically strip out any formatting.
You'll also need your Quicket event page URL*. You won’t have this until your event is live on Quicket - so if it’s live on there, grab the link and make sure you add it to your Facebook event in both the Ticket URL field and your actual event Description to let people know where to buy tickets. If your event on Quicket is not live yet, be sure to come back to Facebook and add the link once it’s live.
This link is crucial - it’s a direct route for people who are interested in booking tickets to do just that, and displays visibly on your Facebook event page. Adding your ticket link to posts you do down the line or simply saying “Get tickets on Quicket” is not sufficient and is sure to lose you ticket sales. If people need to figure out what to do, you’ll lose more of them at every step.
*It’s important to use the direct link to your event page on Quicket and not just www.quicket.co.za.
- Post permissions:
We strongly recommend that you allow anyone to post to your event page, as this is often the place where people come to to find out information about the event. Sometimes people will ask you a question by posting on your Facebook event page event wall.
For this reason, make sure that whoever posts content to the event page is available to answer any comments or questions being left by guests. - Messaging:
Similarly, allow guests to ask questions about your event via Messenger. The more channels you have for communication, the more your guests will feel they can reach you to answer any questions they may have. - Guest list:
Always display your event’s guest list. It’s a huge encouragement to people considering your event. - Co-hosts:
You might be tempted to add Quicket as a co-host for your event. We ask that you rather don’t: add all the partners involved in the running of your event that you want, but Quicket does not accept co-host requests as it incorrectly conveys that we are running the event.
Your page’s messages need to be checked daily at a minimum in the lead up to an event.
That said, we can still add your event to Quicket’s Facebook event listing page. Any event that you run through Quicket that is public-facing should automatically be added to that Facebook event list a few days after going live on Quicket. Note this is a manual process so if ever you'd like it to be added sooner, you're welcome to simply pop us a Facebook message or email [email protected] to give us the heads-up.
We cover content creation, what you should post about, what’s crucial to include, and how to manage your social posts later in this course, but we have some Facebook-specific pointers for you to keep in mind in the meantime.
Here’s what you need to do:
Tip: In each of the following points except point 1, you should include both the link to your event on Facebook for where people can express interest and keep up to date with info about the event, as well as your direct Quicket event page link for where to buy tickets.
- Start by inviting all your Facebook friends to your event.
- As we’ve mentioned, people respond best to in-person requests, so you can do the same as you did with your event page ‘like requests’ and send a broadcast message on WhatsApp to invite people.
- You can do the same on Facebook by directly sharing the event via private message.
- Make sure you invite enough people - you need to invite a significantly higher number of people than the tickets you have available. In your invitations to your personal networks, ask them to express their interest in the event on Facebook, and to invite their own networks - regardless of whether they’re able to attend or not.
- Post about the event to your page’s timeline to let people know about it and get them excited about it. (We cover this in more detail later in this course).
- Also post about it on your personal timeline - share your excitement about your event and get your social network excited about it as well. (Be sure to go through the lesson on content for your event later in this course.)
- Once there are people invited to your event, start posting content to your event page specifically - and remember to post as your brand page as opposed to your personal profile. Guests need to have daily content and communication on the event page to get them enthused (and spreading the word about the event to their respective networks). This content should be directly related to the event, and should build excitement about what to expect. A lot of organisers make the mistake of posting this type of content to their brand page as opposed to their event page on Facebook. The event page is where these posts need to happen first. You can share these posts from your event page to your brand page after posting, but they need to be on the event page first - this is where excitement and momentum for your event is built.
- We can’t stress this last point enough - every single post (for example the posts we mentioned in the previous point) have to include your direct Quicket event page link. People on the internet are lazy and need to be spoon-fed, so this link needs to be as visible as possible in as many places as possible. Facebook is a mountain of event noise and in order to stand out, you need to speak directly to the people who matter, and make it really easy for them to access what they need.
Tip: Facebook has a nifty feature where you can tag an event directly to your post. Simply click on the 3 dots below the area where you’d write your post, select ‘Event tickets’, then start typing the name of your event and select it. Finish writing your post, and click ‘Share now’. Still include your direct Quicket event page link for where to buy tickets as well!
Talk to your ticket buyers
Lesson 2: Registering your Quicket account, setting up your Organiser Profile - Section 5
It’s imperative that you communicate with your existing audience on both your Facebook brand page and Facebook event page in the lead up to any event, and if you have any budget, to run some ads as well.
Later in this course, we’ll go into more detail about what to post, what’s crucial to include, running ads for your event, and the best ways to do this effectively and save time in the process. But first, we cover other social platforms.
Ready for the next lesson of our Quicket Event Marketing Course? Click here.
Nina is the Marketing Manager for Quicket and is passionate about growing a community of event organisers into one that is empowered to create incredible experiences. An event organiser herself, she’s also worked across brand marketing, social media, and in the non-profit world. She’s a burner (AfrikaBurn) at heart, an avid baker, loves a good hug, and cooking dinner for friends over a glass of good wine.