Gig success tip #3 – Promote your Facebook Event page

Having created their facebook event page for the gig, many acts think their promotional work is done. 

But to gain the maximum traction and in turn audience, its really just the beginning of an ongoing process till gig day itself.

Remember, according to the Marketing ‘Rule of 7’ it takes seven advertising or promotion ‘impressions’ (encounters) for the customer to take action to make a purchase.  Although that number will be significantly less when audience members ‘sign up’ to receive promotional messages such as when they Like your Artist page.  

Here’s some easy steps to maximizing the reach of your event page.

Ask each band member to ‘Invite’ their friends

Gig promotion shouldn’t fall on the shoulders of just one band member.  The more each member gets involved, the greater the audience to raise awareness of the gig and in turn commitment to attend.

As part of this thinking, its worth remembering that less Facebook posts now reach less than 3% of your pages Friends or Followers. 

That’s an awful lot of your followers who won’t know about the gig without further promotion of your event page.

This is where Facebook’s nifty ‘Invite’ functionality comes in very handy indeed.

The best use of this is to have each band member and any other parties like managers and agents, use this functionality to select the Friends they think will be interested, and then Invite them.

This action will create a notification in the feeds of every single recipient selected, meaning it ‘gets to’ 100% of your invitees instead of the tiny <3% of an ordinary post.

But wait theres more!

The invitation is just the start of the ‘viral’ process built in to Facebook.  Once the recipient selects either ‘interested’ or ‘going’, all their Friends are notified in turn.  This means your gig is being promoted to a whole new group of connections that may not yet be a follower of your page.

Additionally, one of these actions means that the gig is added to the Calendar functionality of Facebook and that you are notified as the gig approaches via the Calendar feed – a very useful capability indeed.

Once you have selected the recipients for your Invitation, Facebook usefully saves that as a list, meaning you simply select that list instead of having to repeat what can be a time-consuming process all over again.

Share to relevant Groups

Some pre-work is needed here if you haven’t already done so. 

Facebook Groups are one of the best ways of getting your name out to new audiences, whether you have a gig or not.

Fundamentally the members of each Group are interested in any of your style of music or news around the locality of the gig, so are a valuable source of new followers or candidates to attend.

So before you even do a post from your artist page, it’s a great idea to join as many relevant Groups as possible to spread the word cheaply and easily.

So once you have successfully joined these Groups, they are ready to have your event page shared to them, various Group rules of engagement permitting of course.

To add extra relevance to the Group, add a topical and engaging comment when sharing the post.

Tag band members and other relevant parties

The other important thing to do when posting into Groups, is tag both the location of the gig and any relevant individuals or pages to the ‘I am with’ tagging capability.

By doing this, followers of those individuals will receive a notification of the tag, a very valuable ‘viral’ capability.

A note of caution with this is that the more Groups you tag Friends into, the more notifications common members will receive and this will appear a little spam-like.

Therefore I wouldn’t tag relevant Friends into more than say two Group shares to avoid this problem.

And also remember not to overdo the tagging to people not connected to the Group.

Give it a boost

Finally because of the low ‘feed’ rate to Friends these days, it’s really worth considering a paid ‘boost’ to ensure your event page hits its mark.

Really any investment at all will be worthwhile as this form of advertising has proven to be very effective – especially given most are passionate about their live music and being informed of gigs they like.

As little as $10 or $20 will be dramatically increase your views but consider $50-$100 to really ensure effective reach.

When selecting audiences for boosting too, your followers and friends of followers will be the most interested but its worth looking at broader audiences like fans of your music genre within say 5km of the gig location and variations of this approach.

In terms of timing, while boosting can certainly be used late in the campaign, it makes better sense to try it from the outset when most recipients are yet to make plans on the date of your gig.

By following this routine, your event page will be seen by many times more potential attendees than just setting and forgetting it.

Are these suggestions consistent with your management of facebook event pages?  Tell us about it in the comments below.
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