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Facebook - How do I promote a party/ event? Great strategy ideas...

Update: October 6, 2012

Facebook is rolling out a new, $7 option called "Promoted posts" to make your post show up at the top of everyone's news feed.

Goal & Theory:

  • If you just want to see the steps you should take, go to "Exact Steps" below
  • To help promote a Facebook event, you want to make sure it shows up at the top of your friends News feeds, and hopefully at the top of their friend's news feeds
  • When Facebook is trying to determine what events to put at the top of your friend's news feeds, it looks at each post, using an algorithm called "EdgeRank"

Making your post look important:

  • If you want to make your posts look important to Facebook's "EdgeRank" algorithm,
    • get people to "Share" it
      • This is by far the most important thing. If Facebook sees that one person "Shares" another's post, Facebook thinks it must really be important. The more Shares, the more important.
      • This is the equivalent of people passing on "buzz" in the real world, saying to other friends, "Did you hear about XXXX?". Not that Facebook engineers know anything about the real world, by the way.
    • get people to comment
      • Comments are 4 times as powerful as Likes in Facebook's eyes because they require more work
    • get people to click "Like"

Timing:

  • To get maximum visibility, think about when your friends will be looking at Facebook, which is usually between 4 PM and 10 PM
    • some look at Facebook before they leave work, and many do it after dinner. A huge mistake people make is posting something before they go to bed, and it stays "hot" on Facebook in the middle of the night when no one is looking.


Exact steps:

  • Post the event at about 4 PM
    • find the event by clicking Facebook in the upper left hand corner, clicking Events on the left, finding your event, and clicking "Share" on the lower left side of the event page.
    • In your post, tell people to Share it, and ask them to make the comment to have others Share it
  • Call or email your friends and tell them to "Share" your post about the event
    • NOTES:
      • this cannot be done by most apps on most phones, especially most Iphones, so you have to tell people to do it on their computer.
      • most people won't do it even if you ask them to, so you really have to push them.
      • after you have posted it, find the address of the post by doing the following:
        • looking at the post on your own wall
        • Under your name on the post, it will say something like "5 minutes ago". Click on that, and it will take you to the URL of the post.
      • Tell people to click on that URL and to click the "Share" button under that URL
      • Tell people to put text in their post that says, "Please click the 'Share' button to share this with your friends
      • tell them to click "Like" and make a comment under the event
      • you can monitor how many people shared the post by doing the following:
        • look at the URL for your post, and if someone shared it, in the upper right, it will say "Shares" with a number
        • click on that to see who shared the event
  • Change the first line of the Event description to say "Please click SHARE" so that when the event is posted, people see that line
  • The event will only stay "hot" for 12-36 hours, and you can't do this every day, so its probably a good idea to do it twice
    • once about 3 weeks before the party, when people are likely to put it on their calendar and remember
    • once on Tuesday or Wednesday before a weekend event

Good luck!

 

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