How to promote your event online, part 2 — Facebook
10/31/2008
Written by Jack
Welcome to the 2nd installment of a new series of articles I
kicked-off last month on the subject of how to promote your events online. Part One was all about Twitter. Last month I
laid-out what I hope were some easy to follow and execute techniques for using
Twitter to market your event. Check it out now, if you missed it the
first time!
As a general disclaimer, I should say that the methods and ideas
I’ll be writing about in this series are not my own. I don’t organize events.
What I know about promoting events online is 100% based on what I see users of
Eventbrite doing. Y’all are the amazing ones. I am ever-in-awe of how clever
and inventive a group of users you are. My position here at Eventbrite affords
me the opportunity to “snoop” on what y’all are doing. And it is only for that
reason that I have any insight into event marketing on the Web. So, thanks for
that!
This month I want to share a few tips for using Facebook to good
effect. But first I want to talk a little bit about the idea of creating
“multiple instances” of your event on the Web. Eventbrite recommends posting
your event on as many other sites as you can. We believe so strongly in the
idea that we actually publish your event for you on a whole network of
publisher partner sites. At a minimum, you give
a prospective attendee, whom you might not have otherwise reached, a way to
discover your event.
On Facebook, you gain that, but you also gain the opportunity
to take advantage of a host of wonderful socialization mechanisms that Facebook
has created especially for events.
The first step is, of course, to create an event page on
Facebook for your event. You just have to provide the basic details — when,
where, etc. And be sure to include a link back to your Eventbrite page in the
space provided for a URL. Once you’ve done this, you can proceed to invite
people from your network. But, honestly, that’s kinda boring. You can do that
on Eventbrite. What’s really fun to do on Facebook with your event is to ask
people who can’t come to your event to say they are. This can
include people who live too far away to attend, are celebrities, or just
wouldn’t be all that interested in attending. Especially desirable are people
with big personal networks or networks with a focus on your event’s target
attendee demographic. Ask yourself, who in my network is friends with the
people I’d like to have attend? When they say they’re going, all their friends
can see your event! This technique can be extremely effective. Suddenly that
“weak link” with half of IBM’s EMEA sales force in his network is your new best
friend — 
Another very effective technique is what I call carpet-bombing.
This is when you ask a small number of people who all share a lot of common
friends to RSVP at once. This can create the impression that an event is
hot and that you should be sure to get in on what’s
happening. Say for example, you wanted to target Goodby Silverstein, all
you would have to do is get two or three account managers and that popular admin
to RSVP and you’d start an avalanche. Here again, it’s nice that your friends
can do this for you without actually having to show up or even buy a ticket,
lol.
But perhaps my favorite Facebook feature for events is the
ability to have attendees’ photo uploads automatically tagged to your event. I
love it. Facebook let’s you assume that people who said they were
going to your event, and who upload any pictures during your event or for a
short time after your event, are uploading pictures from your event.
Facebook informs the uploader that [insert your event name] is
suggesting a tag for their image. This is, of course, great if your
event actually generated many photographs and people are actually uploading them
to Facebook. But it’s also kinda cool because it let’s you “hijack” all the
photo upload activity of anybody who RSVPed to your event. This is a great way
to extend the visibility of your event after the fact and prime future
invitees.
Thanks again to all the Eventbrite event organizers who teach me
something new every day. We’ll see you back here next month.
How to promote your event online, part 3 — email
12/10/2008
Written by Jack
Giving our event holders the power to exploit email for the
success of their events is an important part of the Eventbrite service pledge.
We continue to put a lot of thought and development work into our email features
and capabilities. So stay tuned for exciting new email-related product
announcements very soon. We’ve also been working hard to ensure that emails
sent through Eventbrite enjoy world class deliverability, stay out spam
filters and reach their intended recipients with a near-100% success
rate.
Given so much email horsepower under the Eventbrite hood, for
this month’s installment of How to Promote your Event Online, I thought I’d take a look at making the most of
email.
As a general comment I will say that more is
more. We certainly make it easy to send lots of email to your invitees as well
as to those who’ve already registered to your event. And since use of
Eventbrite email services is entirely free, we encourage you to take advantage
as much as possible. All we ask is that you send emails conscientiously and
keep the quality of your emails high. We live in an age of automated (form)
emails, so a little creativity and personality can help your invitees become and
stay interested in your messages.
To that end, here are some email content ideas and suggestions
based on things I’ve seen work for some of our event holders.
But before we delve into content, first a question of timing.
How long before your event should you send your first invitation? is a question
I hear all the time. The best answer here is the least desirable for the
thoughtless person — “It depends.” So the trick here is to be thoughtful. Some
things are obvious. For example, the bigger a deal an event is, generally the
farther in advance you hear about it. This is not necessarily a function of how
difficult to pull together an event might be — although that can certainly be
the case. This is generally because the producers of big, expensive events like
to milk the PR and build up buzz for a good long time prior to the event. If
you have a lot of buzz to build in advance or want to extend the exposure window
for your sponsors, go ahead and start early. I’ve seen annual
events send out invitations as soon as the week after the event. This can be
masterfully done when you combine the first invitation with the after-event
wrap-up in one email. When people are still feeling good about the event they
just attended might be a great time to hit them up for the next one.
Capitalizing on post-event goodwill in the form of a super-earlybird discount can be very effective. The
one caution about beginning your email promotion efforts very far in advance of
your event is that you have to be prepared to sustain and even build activity as
your event date gets closer. It would be absurd to send out a single invitation
a year in advance of the event and expect for anyone to show up.
Likewise, it is easy to annoy your invitees if you barrage them
with invites and reminders too frequently. It
is an art to be able to continuously talk about something without appearing to
sell it. Successful event promoters learn and master this art.
For starters, an invitation doesn’t have to look like an
invitation. It doesn’t have to say “Come” or “Register” anywhere. Once you
appreciate that the content of your “invitation” can be anything that makes
people register when they get it, you can begin to see some of the
possibilities.
One idea is to talk to your invitees like they’re already going.
Don’t make the subject of the email the fact that the recipient has not yet
registered for the event. This makes people feel alienated and somewhat
hostile. Don’t browbeat your invitees with recriminations like “Why haven’t you
registered yet?” or “There are only 3 days left before the event!”. Those types
of messages work against you. Most people don’t like it when other people try
to create urgency for them. Most people prefer to create urgency for
themselves. So the trick is to make people feel anxious that they aren’t yet
registered for your event. You want to make them begin to worry that if they
don’t go they’re going to miss something worthwhile.
Come up with ways to foster a feeling of inclusion
among those who are already going to your event. Think of the club
effect. It’s human to want to join something that others around you are
joining. Use email to let people know that benefits are accruing to those who
have already registered.
If you have sponsors, don’t forget to give them visibility in
the invitations. This sounds academic, but is overlooked surprisingly often.
And don’t just drop some logos here and there. Give your sponsors the
opportunity to engage your invitees with their content. I’m
sure they all have recent blog posts they’d love to have people read. These
kinds of collaborations with event organizers can give sponsor sites a
significant boost in readership from a targeted audience, not to mention just
plain traffic. They’ll reward you for that with great material, which, if
chosen thoughtfully, can do a great deal to drive registration to your event.
A great recent example that comes to mind was the Apps for Democracy event, which brought an
obscure government web resource to the attention of the Washington DC tech
elite. Win-win.
If the organizer of the event is itself a company, then link to
your own blog posts and news areas when you send invitations and registration
reminders. Choose content that builds towards the event. Even
if your invitee audience is somewhat “captive”, as is the case with many company
events, you can still take advantage of the attention-opportunity you create
when you send somebody an email. Use this space to highlight key ideas of a
presentation you intend to make, to foster discussion around a topical area, or
even to have people vote on things — like the speaker presentation order. This
latter is a quite powerful driver of registrations, as many people will sign up
just for the opportunity to influence (even in some small way) what will happen
during the event.
Event-related content that is available in advance of the event
only to those who register is also very compelling. For many seminars and
classes, a big part of the draw may be the desire to obtain the class
materials. Reward people who register early with PowerPoints and things that
will build expectation and make the recipient feel special and ahead of
the game. If you have expert speakers and presenters scheduled for
your event, work with them to provide preview samples of their content in your
email invitations.
Many of these ideas involve linking from the email invitation to
an external resource — a blog post, a web page, etc. While this is generally
recommendable, since it offloads content from the body of the email and gives
you more room to deliver your messages, don’t forget that the goal is to
convert the recipient - to make them register. So, make sure that
these external pages have links back to your Eventbrite registration
page.
For many noob event organizers, the question may yet remain
“Yeah, but what makes for a ‘perfect’ email invitation to an event?” As we’ve
spent some time illuminating above, the successful email invitation can take
many forms. But if I were going to send just one invitation to my event, I
would probably try to include a schedule. More so than almost
any other factor, I would say that giving your invitees a clear picture of what
is going to happen during the event and at what time, drives registrations.
People like to know what to expect.
Eventholder SEO, Part 4
1/21/2009 Written by Jack
Happy 2009, eventholders! This is the 4th installment in the
“How to Promote your Events Online” series, though I am dropping that part from the titles from now on.
Too many words.
The goal of this article will be to share a number of simple
tactics you can use to try to improve the performance of your Eventbrite event
registration pages in search engine results. These recommendations and tips
derive from some of the things I’ve seen work for some of our
eventholders.
1. The very first point is to be sure your event is
public. There’s a little check box at
the bottom of your event creation form, under “Additional Options“, marked
“List this event in the Eventbrite directory and on the Internet”. The default
is checked, but make sure, because an unchecked box means your event is dead in
the water SEO-wise. We place a “<meta name=“robots”
content=“noindex, nofollow” />” tag in the code of your page, which is
a pretty effective way of preventing that page from being indexed by the search
engines. This means your page will not turn up in results. When you uncheck
the public box you also deprive yourself of exposure on Eventbrite.com, as we
list only public events on our publicly-available event listing pages. Same
thing goes for blasting out your event to our network of partners. No go. So be sure the box
is checked!
2. Name your event something that helps you.
This is something of a no-brainer, but it bears stressing that your choice of
what to call your event can play a huge role in your SEO performance. The name
of your event is not only the HTML title of the event registration page, it is
also the anchor text that links to your event page from all the places we link
to it on Eventbrite.com. Make the name of your event as close as you can to the
term you’re hoping people will type to find you.
3. Leverage your event organizer page. It’s one of the tenets of
SEO that pages with more links to them are more important and therefore more
deserving of visibility. You can take advantage of that principle on Eventbrite
by exploiting the fact that all your event registration pages link back to your
organizer page, making it a kind of hub. This imparts a small but meaningful
amount of additional SEO merit to your organizer page which can make all the
difference. Be sure to give the event organizer a useful name that contains
your target terms, as the organizer name will be used as the anchor text in
links to that page from your registration pages. A great example of this tactic
being used to good effect is this organizer who is placing very high for
“Adwords Seminars“.
4. Link to your registration page from every place you can, from
your blog, from your company web site, from your friend’s blog. Use the term
you want to rank high for as the anchor text in the links. This is pretty much
the most effective of all the techniques, if you can only do one. Here’s an
example on behalf of an eventholder who wants to place high for “Stanford
Burns supper“. It really works.
5. The last pointer I want to leave you with is start
early. The effects of the tactics described above increase with the
passage of time, so be sure to create your event now and get
a jump on the competiti
This is a follow-up post, because so many of you have asked me about Twitter SEO. Specifically, how to build the Pagerank of your Twitter page. The answer relates to the ways a website distributes Pagerank throughout it’s domain. Prior to the wide adoption of the XML sitemap protocol by all the search engines, which allows for the ability to afford relative importance-weight to individual pages, the SEs relied on intra-site links to discern which were the most important pages on a site. The way it works is the absolute Pagerank of a site (and by that I mean the external Pagerank, the Pagerank given to a website by its link relationships with other sites) is distributed to other pages on that site by the number of links given to those pages and by the Pagerank of the pages giving those links. It’s essentially the external Pagerank mechanism, with the key difference being that external Pagerank comes from the collective effect of all the sites that link to one site, while internal Pagerank flows from the page with the highest PR (usually the home page) on a site, down to the pages to which it links, and so on. On most sites, the highest PR pages are simply those linked to from the home page — about us, etc. But UGC sites create the opportunity to exploit user activity to distribute Pagerank, which is extremely cool. Twitter does this by creating links on user pages when they follow people. This allows “popularity” (literally) to determine which are the most important Twitter pages on Twitter.com. What this means for those of you who are interested in building the INTERNAL Pagerank of your own Twitter page is that you simply have to get a lot of people to follow you. Duh. But there’s a rub. Twitter displays only a limited number of follower links on each person’s Twitter page. Recently, this number was reduced dramatically from about 100 (tiny thumbnails) to just 36. Clearly, they realized the system is more effective with a smaller number. But not too small, here’s why. Twitter displays only the TOP-36 people you’re following. They are sorting the pages of the people you follow by their internal Pagerank and displaying only the highest ranking people in your sidebar. This is a brilliant system since it allows for both regionalized and distributed clustering modalities at many levels of relative magnitude. Most people would think that the best thing to do is try to get high PR people to follow you. But the problem is that popular people (especially the SUPER popular) follow a lot of popular people, too. It’s part of their own popularity, lol. So, even if followed by one of them, your link will never appear in their sidebar. There are just too many more popular people ahead of you. So what you want to do is get people to follow you who are following fewer than 36 people themselves. This guarantees your link will show on their page. As your PR grows, you’ll be able to target-follow any person into whose “top 36″ list you qualify. With practice, you’ll get a feel for who you need to go after. It’s really fun seeing yourself show up in high positions on people’s pages!