Facebook - a must for event planners
So, finished stacking up your friends’ list yet? Me neither. As with many social networking sites, quite often we reach that “Nemo moment”, you know, the spot where we’re all in our own plastic bag floating in the bay after a brilliant escape… “Now what?”. Well, a quick answer is start using Facebook as your event promotional tool.
Being the perfect metaphor for a gathering of friends and the development of acquaintance networks, you naturally find those of similar interests, common habits and the same general geographic locations making up vast concentric circles throughout Facebook. This provides event planners the perfect promitional ground for their events. In addition, Facebook provides the tools to to set up an Event page, one that automatically generates an invitation to all that event planner’s friends, one that gets posting on the geographical map and under any subject of interest to Facebook users. Once up, the fun begins.
Once you have established someone as your “friend” you see all of their posts, profile changes and activity. When they add photos to their Facebook page, you know about it, when they join a group, you know it and, when they join an event, you typically get an invite too. A new event posted tends to spread like wildfire through the event planner’s friends, to their friends and outward at rampant pace to individuals across logical regions of interest and geography.
The important element is the start. There are two basic “feeds” to your event listing one being the natural path news of your event posting will take through Facebook’s event listing system. The second is your own friends. The more friends you have the larger your Ground Zero will be. You can also casually cross post your event to other events, by joining them… your event will automatically be ranked amongst that event’s peers in a link list. Groups are also great targets for a quick posting.
Many corporations and organizations participate in events of all kinds… your company can make great strides in public relations with events promoted on Facebook, Myspace and other networks like this. Typically it takes time to set up your own friends network, but once done, you are ready to see viral promotion of any and all events you create.
