Morning All!
Thursday in London town, and very nearly December. Just sitting here in my office catching up on emails, articles and a few other things that are going on.
I am am just working on an Event for someone I do some work for that are launching their new Facebook page, and it occured to me that I should share with you what I think is important about using a Facebook event to help you with your online presence building.
There is NO doubt about it, Facebook today compared to a year ago is much harder work. If you want to build your brand, increase traffic and get your name out there, you are definitely required to work MUCH smarter than ever before (especially if you don’t have a big budget to spend on advertising)
So we are forced to look at other ways to make use of Facebook to our advantage aside from just getting people to LIKE our business page. There are ways of doing this, and using Facebook to create an event is a fantastic way of doing that.
Nothing is more frustrating than trying to launch a product huh?! Whether you are hosting a webinar, opening an online (or offline) store, you’ve written an e-Book, made a video series – You want people to know about it.
It’s all well and good having a Facebook business page to announce this information on but as we all know by now, posts aren’t reaching as far as your likes spread ….. Don’t worry I’m not going to harp on about that again 
Creating a Facebook event is FREE & you can invite as many people to it for FREE as you want. Facebook don’t put any limits on the amount of people that can see / view or click attending. When you make an event on Facebook ‘Public’, and open up the options for the attendees and your friends to invite their friends to it you are giving your product launch one of the best platforms for going viral as possible without spending a single penny.
I know we are ‘told’ that we shouldn’t use our personal profiles for ‘business’ use but we have 2 ways of creating the events – either as our business page OR our personal profile, personally in this instance I use my personal profile to create these events, and I will tell you why.
Facebook ‘friends’ on your personal profile are exactly that YOUR FRIENDS ….. and friends help eachother out. Ok I’m generalising here, but my Facebook is full of actual friends of mine, other people may add people that aren’t strictly speaking ‘friends’ but overall its safe to say your friends will want to help you out, by inviting their contacts to your event.
To a degree here you are relying on others to help you, so its important to get people to support you and tell them what your doing, and asking if they would mind helping out – you should be proud of your launch, and want to share your hard work with as many people as possible – for the end result is to make sales (of some description) so by explaining what you are doing, I’m quite sure your network of friends will want to help you. I know from my own experience that my friends want me to succeed – so when I want people to know about something I am launching or doing I create my event in my own name from my personal profile.
When your friends ‘like’ your event or click attending, their contacts will see this link on their profile page, and in their newsfeed
All of these changes that Facebook have made with their algorithm have just forced people like US to think outside the box a little – it is still a powerful medium for spreading your message, as long as you constantly keep thinking how you can reach people outside of your network. Its important to make use of both business pages and personal profiles (where appropriate of course) to get the traffic to your website. If it’s done correctly (keep in mind WIIFM) the event description is appealing and provides VALUE to the invitees you may easily find that people you don’t even know will be clicking attending and getting involved and finding out what you are offering at the event ‘launch’ and clicking on the links to whatever you are ‘selling’
As John Lennon famously said ….. ‘I get by with a little help from my friends’
Have a great day!
Clair 
Great tips here Clair! Thinking outside the box seems to be the most effective form of advertising online at the moment. New and unique ways of getting your voice/product out there are going to be more effective than traditional mediums which many people turn a blind eye to.
…and any post with a John Lennon quote is good in my book!