This is Day 14 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
Success in a socially networked world comes through building relationships with others. As I wrote on day 8, leading conversations on your page is extremely important. The same thing goes for the offline world. One of the best things you can do for building your company’s reputation is to host offline events. For hosting the event there are a few things to keep in mind but the most important is that you already have a large enough reach that you’ll be able to get attendees to come to your event. Given that you at a minimum have a few hundred fans after your initial efforts, you should have a great start to building buzz about your new event. Today I’m going to walk you through the important steps necessary to hosting a successful event.

Step 1: Pick An Event Topic & Format

To get your event off the ground you’ll first need to know the theme of your event and what the format is. Are you looking to host a conference or just a networking happy hour? My suggestion is that you start small before you jump into launching a full blown conference. Hosting a happy hour is relatively easy and has many less requirements. While many individuals will look for sponsors to cover the cost of an event, you can actually get away with hosting a happy hour for next to nothing. If you don’t have $1,000 to cover a full open-bar, you may want to just limit the tab to a couple hundred dollars and tell the attendees that the first drink is on you. This is a networking event, not a bash, so attendees shouldn’t have any issue with you only covering one drink.

Step 2: Pick A Venue & Negotiate A Deal

Picking a venue can be the most challenging step if you haven’t had any experience with picking a venue. People will try to charge you on a per person basis or other random rates. One of the best things about venues is that they’re totally negotiable and at the end of the day, you have the upper hand because you can just go somewhere else if the venue manager/owner doesn’t provide you with a good deal. I tend to use Yelp when finding event venues to go to but I’ve also invested a large amount of time building out a network so that now I can just post a status update and get venue suggestions from others.

It’s always best to ask your friends and professional contacts for recommendations before going it alone. Venues are much more open to people who have been referred to them through others and will typically be more flexible with rates. If all else fails, just pick a place that you like and run a tab to a specific limit.

Step 3: Create An Event On Facebook

Now that you’ve got your venue it’s time to set up a page for promoting the event. The quickest way to get started is to set up an event on Facebook. You can do this by going to the events application and clicking on the button that says “Create Event” (or follow this link). Setting up an event is relatively straight forward. Facebook will walk you through the process which entails entering an event name, selecting the event visibility (which I recommend setting to “Global” if you want to maximize the turnout), and enter the other event details.

While you can create an event directly from your Facebook Page, there is one downside of creating events directly from pages: event updates are sent to the user’s “updates” tab within their inbox, rather than their regular Facebook inbox. This can significantly reduce the response to the event (most people don’t read their updates). The one benefit of posting the event from your Facebook Page is that there will be a link to the event displayed on the left-hand side of your page. I personally don’t believe that this benefit outweighs the advantages of creating the event outside of your Facebook Page.

Once you have gone through the first step of creating your event, you will be prompted to upload an image and then select which features you’d like to have included in your event (videos, photo album, forum, attendee list, etc). At the bare minimum I would recommend that you include a photo. The other features depend on whether or not you plan on uploading photos from the event and videos. I’ll leave that option up to you.

Step 4: Notify Your Fans and Run An Event Ad

Now that you’ve set up your event, it’s time to start promoting it. The first step to promoting the new Facebook event is to send out an update that lets people know about the event. You can also target your update to users based on their geographic location which can be extremely useful if you want to limit the event to locals. I personally like sending out event updates to all fans since some people occasionally come into town for events. Whatever you choose to do when sending your update, you also need update your Page status a few times so that a message about the event goes out to your fans’ news feeds. As I’ve written before, you’ll receive a greater response from status updates then from page updates.

Create An Event Ad

Targeted ads on Facebook present a huge opportunity for event promoters. You can target people by company, job position, interests, and more as I wrote about on days 10 through 12. I honestly believe that event promoters are the single greatest beneficiaries of Facebook’s advertising system. When hosting conferences I use Facebook to promote the events directly through their advertising system, which increases the list of potential attendees and my promotional reach. I cannot emphasize how powerful Facebook advertisements can be for events. When you go to create your advertisement, select the option which says “I want to advertise something I have on Facebook”. You can then select your event from drop down which is displayed under the sub-heading “Facebook Content”.

Targeted Updates

In addition to creating ads, it’s also possible to send targeted updates (as pictured in the image below). If your event happens to be a local event, there’s no point in updating all of your fans if you have a country-wide or international brand. Create a targeted update by clicking on “Send An Update To Fans” on the left-hand side of the Facebook Page you’d like to promote the event to. On the next page check the box which says “Target this update” and select the region, gender, and age of people that you’d like to update.

Step 5: Send Out Event Reminders

Now that you have invited people to your event and people are registering to attend, it’s a good idea to send out regular event updates. Make sure you don’t overdo it though because too many updates will turn people off and result in less attendees. Once or twice a week (depending on how soon your event is), send an update to let them know about the current number of RSVPs, and updates about the venue, and any information about new sponsors. These event updates will get people to RSVP “Yes” that have not yet RSVPed or have replied “Maybe”. It’s also a great people to remind those individuals that have RSVPed from one of your event ads about your event and instruct them to take any other necessary actions (such as purchase a ticket if the event costs something).

Daily Task

Now that you’ve learned how to set up a successful event, it’s time to start brainstorming! Today your task is to brainstorm and event idea and come up with 5 potential venues. Once you’ve determined the what and the where, you are halfway there! And if you are hesitant about creating a new event, just remember the Wayne’s World quote: “If you build it, they will come.”