In general, social media for businesses is known for maintaining existing relationships and generating leads from them while finding new prospects. This is because it is easier for businesses to target a well-developed audience. But this audience needs to be constantly engaged.
One of the ideas to nurture existing relationships is organizing webinars. It is becoming more and more important for businesses nowadays, mainly because of the following reasons:
- Webinars quickly replace extensive training programs
- You can share knowledge with customers and prospects in order to increase engagement
- Webinars can ignite a real conversation
- You can portray yourself as an expert in the field
- They can help you sell while sharing knowledge
- Webinars are easy to attend without many organizational requirements, wherever in the world you are
- They are a great way to rival your competitors
However, it isn’t so easy but requires ample efforts to get more people to attend your webinar. To reach a wider audience with your content, it’s beneficial to broadcast a live stream on social media channels. With a software system like LiveWebinar, you’re able to make a broadcast in High Quality and generate new leads.
And for that, you need a good amount of promotion to make your webinar a success. One of the platforms that have the most useful features to launch and promote an event on Facebook.
Why exactly should you use Facebook for webinar promotion?
Facebook, with its extensive event launching features, can ensure up to the mark promotion and delivery of your webinar. This also increases the chances of your webinar reaching more people, as your fans and followers might just share it with their friends and community. If not, your fan’s friends on Facebook may see their status about the webinar in a news feed post, notification, on the event page itself, or in the events section of your profile.
Source: Medium
Well, that’s the power of social media!
You might be pumped up now to create, launch, and promote an event on Facebook. Let’s help you with a step-by-step guide on how to do it.
How to set up a Facebook event & promotion for a webinar?
Step 1: Create an event
To launch a webinar on Facebook, firstly you will need to create an event. This can be created from a personal profile, a group, or even a business page. Let’s go through it one by one.
Creating a webinar event from a personal profile is quite simple and takes just a few steps. You just have to click on the “Events” tab in your newsfeed, and away you go. After adding the necessary details and a cover image for your webinar, you can simply launch the webinar event.
If you are creating a webinar event from a group or a business page, first browse to its Facebook page/group and then create the event.
Facebook Group: Press the “Events” tab on the left sidebar then on “Create event.”
Facebook Business Page: Go to the “Events” tab, or click on the drop-down menu of options to find “Events”, and then click on “Create event.”
Fill in all the information and add an event photo that people will see as a cover image when they open your webinar event page.
If you work on creating a separate page for your webinar it will also allow people to invite others, which could be beneficial for your business. And when a user gets an invitation they can choose from these options: ‘Going’, or ‘Interested’
Pro Tip: For a webinar, it is recommended that you create a public event and not a private event, so that more people can view and become a part of it.
Caution: Keep in mind that once created, you can’t change a private event to a public one and vice versa.
Step 2: Let people know more about your webinar
According to Sellfy's guide on information products, a webinar is the best selling information product today. However, people want to know more about the event before signing up for a webinar. So, after you are done creating your webinar event, don’t just leave it blank. How exactly can you do that?
Start with posting more information about your webinar, as it includes promoting events on Facebook. This can show details about the webinar orators, their work and achievements, benefits of the webinar, or videos as excerpts from the past webinars, etc. There are so many options of content to post depending on what your webinar is about. You can also post there to notify people of any last-minute changes.
Moreover, you can also add testimonials and reviews from your past webinars, which will help you create social proof for your webinar event. Taking a step further towards promoting your webinar, you might want to allow people to post on it themselves with some approval loop. This will increase the probability of audience engagement.
Step 3: Share your webinar event
Another thing you can do to promote an event on Facebook is share them with more people in every way possible. For a webinar to reach more people organically requires some solid effort. Start by sharing your webinar event on some relevant Facebook groups and pages, and even on your own profile.
You can either go to the event page and click on the “Share in Messenger” or “Share as Post” buttons. As an alternative, you can create a Facebook chatbot that can help promote the event. Messenger chatbot can also help with the event registration process and sending reminder messages before the webinar itself.
Source: https://myownconference.com/blog/en/index.php/promote-event-fb/
You can also create an event link and share it with prospects through any medium possible, including your friends and family. You could also leverage other social media platforms to promote your webinar.
It is advisable to introduce your webinar on other social media platforms with a compelling visual and an attached Facebook event link. You can also create and publish a short clip with the help of video editing tools to gather more engagement.
Step 4: Invite your friends
Another step to promote an event on Facebook is to invite more people to your webinar. The first what you need to consider is if your event is public or private.
For private webinar events: Click on “Invite” below the cover picture and select the people you want to send an invitation to.
Here, you can choose to send the invitation to any one person, a manually selected group of them, or all of them. To send it to all of your friends click on the “Select All” button and end by clicking “Send Invites”.
Note that you cannot share your webinar event if it’s private. Only people who have been invited can view it.
For public webinar events: Click on “Share” and then “Invite friends”, where you can also send invites to all your friends by choosing them altogether.
Facebook allows you to filter people in terms of their age, location, gender, and previous events they attended. But remember that Facebook only allows one single user to invite a maximum of 500 people to an event.
Step 5: Promote your webinar via paid ads
The Facebook Ads platform offers a variety of features to promote your webinar to people who might be interested in it. One of them is the “Boost Event” option on the right side of your event page in the desktop version.
After this, you get two options to choose from, which are “Reach more people” and “Increase ticket sales”. The former will make your webinar event visible to more people, while the latter will direct the audience to your ticket website.
While redirecting the audience to the ticket website might lead to a higher bounce rate, you might want to work with a Facebook ticketing partner.
Moving on, you need to add details like text and images to create your ad.
Here, you can target people who like your page, their friends, and custom audiences in terms of their age, gender, and location, etc. Finish the process by clicking on “Boost” at the end.
Step 6: Contact with relevant influencers
You can promote an event on Facebook thanks to influencers. Considering spreading the word with the help of influencers, which can be a great way to get more people to attend your webinar. Start by searching for opinion leaders in your market niche. These people have a huge number of audiences that might be interested in your Facebook webinar.
You can either collaborate with them by giving them something in exchange for posts and promotion, i.e. offers, products, or memberships, etc. Or you could pay them to promote your webinar on their pages.
This is one of the most effective ways to come across more people, as it creates social proof. Because when a person they trust and follow promotes something, it directly builds up a certain amount of trust in the user’s mind.
Pro Tip from Shobit Gupta (a Marketing Expert at SocialPilot): you may also want to invite guest speakers to get more engagement since the speaker will promote the webinar on their social media networks too.
Step 7: Analyze each step
The last step to promote an event on Facebook. Analyzing the progress of your webinar promotion is an essential thing to do. This will not only help you improve and improvise on what you are currently doing, but will also help you make better decisions in the future. Don't forget to take care of everyday analytics, management, and Facebook comment moderation.
Facebook allows you to view statistics of current and previous events. Here you can find out how many people you reached and how many of them gave positive responses.
For example, here the audience targeted is men aged 23 to 34, and Facebook shows insights on the number of people that this event post reached and how many responses it got.
Wrapping up the benefits of Facebook promotion
Following these steps can bring a great amount of traction to your webinar’s success on Facebook. Combining the techniques mentioned above i.e. sharing with friends, targeted advertising, and collaborating with influencers can give you the best of what Facebook can offer.
Though you should always make sure that your event page is updated, so if any new users come by they will still get all of the necessary details in one place. Even if you post your webinar event page on other social media networks, this will be the first thing they see about your event when they click the link.
Also, when posting on other social media platforms, try using a keyword rank checker to see what most people are looking for concerning your business and write posts on other social media platforms accordingly. On the other hand, this could also help you come up with a webinar topic itself.
While there are ample effective ways to bring more engagement organically, using Facebook ad tools to promote your webinar may also be a great choice. With a marketing budget in hand, I am sure you will be able to nail the techniques of getting your webinar promoted through Facebook ads manager.
What else should you keep in mind?
The webinar promotion process doesn’t finish right after the end of the event. There are many things you can do to maintain contact with your participants. We know that all these actions you can undertake might seem overwhelming, which is why we’ve prepared a short cheat sheet for you. In this article you can learn what to do to nurture leads after a webinar.
Finally, as obvious as it might sound, you can’t conclude webinar promotion without using a robust software system that allows you to stream live videos online. LiveWebinar offers this, and many other features, which can make you stand out of the crowd with your content.
Aren’t convinced yet? Here’s a list of ten reasons which show you why choosing LiveWebinar will pay off.
If you’re looking for a platform that allows you to fully customize your videos, you’re in the right place. We’ll be happy to create an offer tailored specifically to your needs.