The Biggest Mistake in FB Event Promotion
UPDATE! Facebook appears to have fixed this issue when creating new events!
UPDATE! Facebook appears to have fixed this issue when creating new events!
What’s the biggest mistake you can make as a dance event promoter on FB? Roughly 10% of dance events are making this simple mistake, that keeps them from doubling their attendees! Find out below if you’re making the same mistake!
We here at DanceDeets have over 200,000 street dance events worldwide (as of 2017), and we’ve seen all sorts of mistakes that dance event promoters make. But in early-mid 2015, Facebook changed their interface (yet again!), and ever since then this mistake is super easy to make, and most people never even realize they’re doing it!
According to our historical data from DanceDeets’ events, if a normal event would have 2,000 FB attendees, then an event with this mistake will only have 750 attendees! Yes that’s right, fixing this one mistake can more than double your event’s visibility! And this has been affecting roughly 10% of events since Facebook’s changes in mid-2015.
Can you spot the mistake when creating an event below?
It may be obvious if you know what you’re looking for, but it’s almost invisible when you’re not!
Yup, sadly it’s that easy to accidentally create a private event. Facebook changed the privacy defaults after 1,500 people showed up uninvited to a girl’s party. On mobile, it can be even easier to mix up, as can be seen in the iPhone screenshot below. Yes, Facebook provides the blue banner the first time to let you know what’s happening, but doesn’t explain how to fix it! And once you dismiss it, good luck remembering next time…
And as the blue banner said, there’s no changing the privacy setting once you create an event! So if you’ve accidentally created a private event and invited hundreds of friends, you have no choice but to delete and re-create the event, and re-invite those friends. And if your guests invited any of their own friends, hopefully they’ll remember to do that too! Much better to just get things right the first time…
Biggest reason public events do better?
So why do public events end up doing more than 200% better? When an event is public, Facebook has a lot more freedom to promote this event to people it thinks might be interested: the news ticker, the event recommendations which show up in Facebook, and more. But probably the biggest effect, is that friends see activity on public events in their Facebook News Feed like this:
So next time you go to create an event, remember to mark that event Public! And if you do your part to host and promote good events, we’ll do our part to make sure that DanceDeets lists your event for dancers and interested dance fans worldwide. But you can always add your events directly to DanceDeets too, if you want to ensure your event is listed on the world’s authoritative site for street dance events.
Facebook wasn’t designed for what we need in event promotion, and sometimes it shows. DanceDeets is designed around event promotion and event discovery, and we hope it can help you and your community do a better job reaching each other.
(This Medium article was originally posted on Facebook in 2016)