Event Launch Strategies

Next off, once you have your Facebook profile all set up, you can build as many separate pages as you want for your businesses, products, events or launches. You can customize and design your pages around your business and position yourself as an expert in each. These pages are meant for businesses, so they have ‘fans’ instead of ‘friends’ in them.

Facebook pages are an incredibly powerful tool for marketing. They’re free platforms and spaces for your business right in the middle of your targeted customers. You need to build a fan base around the page content. Then you need to stream content into the page as frequently as possible, relevant to the page itself as this content is syndicated through all the fans of the pages mini news-feed. If you have 100 fans to the page and you post a picture every day about an event along with a mini post then these 100 fans will see it in their mini-feed.

To build a Facebook page, go through the simple process of creating a new page (facebook.com/business). Your Facebook pages are publicly visible and searchable. You can make as many Facebook pages as you want. Keep in mind that pages have to be for real entities. You can also build one page per event. You can go through their rules in the page setup wizard so that the event itself can be shown as a business. You can make your pages interesting by adding pictures, applications, posts and links (to your sites). Whenever you change something on your page, an update is sent to all of the fans of the page in their news feeds. Here’s a screenshot of a Facebook page that we have setup as a brochure advertisement for “Social Traffic”.

When you have your basic page set up, allow the community to build around it. You have to attract people to join in, as they won’t just accidentally fall on the page. A page is like a particular sponsor’s tent within a festival. You need to attract people to the tent and keep them entertained and interested in that particular tent so they remember it. Often times they will tell others about it and even leave their contact details as an invitation to invite them into a conversation. In a Facebook Page this would mean that they have become a ‘fan’. It’s these invitations that are the foundation of our businesses and we will discuss what to do with them a little later in the book. Once a person becomes a fan he/she can upload photos, write on the wall and talk to other fans. The idea is to make them feel like it’s their own space. When other people (non-fans) see the activity, they are incentivized to join as well. This is how you get more people to the sponsor’s tent. Those who have visited the tent may invariably spend the rest of the day walking throughout the party telling others that that particular tent is a must to visit. The only difference with social media is that you don’t need a festival or a sponsor’s tent to be doing this 24/7/365; and the audience is infinite.

Make everything an experience. Make the pages interesting and interactive so that they appeal to your targeted audiences and empower them. For example, if you’re launching an event, make an event page and get the prospects to contribute to the event setup or stage design. You have to give people a reason for engaging with the community that you are building around any object.

Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)

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