Using Facebook for Multi-Day Events
If your church is looking to increase involvement with a multi-day event, like a VBS or a sermon series, Facebook is likely the tool you are looking for. Because of its reach in your community and also because of its instant availability, social media has the ability to generate a lot of excitement for your multi-day event. Below are some tips to help you be more successful.
Create an Event
Creating a Facebook event allows people to join the event. This is great because it not only means they will see event updates as notifications, but they will also get a reminder when the event is coming up. It is a great way to communicate updates and reminders and also generate excitement. Adding promotional videos or registration links to the event will further improve it’s effectiveness.
Post Lots of Pictures
Posting picture updates is an excellent way to continue excitement throughout the event. Posting daily updates and tagging people will really amp up the involvement with your event. Look for opportunities to really get people to engage with these, like a photo booth or something similar.
Just a word of caution, make sure you have the necessary forms when taking and posting pictures of minors.
Respond to Comments
If someone takes the time to ask a question about the event, respond as quickly as possible. Actively monitoring the event page and your church’s page leading up to and during a multi-day event is a just another way you show that your church takes this seriously.
People will ask questions that have already been asked or that are clearly answered in the event description or directly on the flyer. Answer them anyway. With the Pages Manager app from Facebook, this is super easy as you get notifications whenever someone comments. The Facebook app itself has a tendency to be unreliable here, so if you are on the move a lot, you will want to have the Pages app installed.
Even Negative Ones
Additionally, don’t be too scared of negative comments. Instead, choose to manage them publicly, at least to a point. People will silently watch how you manage those types of comments and, believe it or not, they will actually generate interest if handled properly.
There may come a point when you have to decide to delete the comments if they become offensive, but don’t be too quick on this. Having a policy in place ahead of time will help you know where that line is.
Utilizing these methods can significantly improve the impact of any event, but are especially helpful for multi-day events as the event itself can be used to generate excitement. People want to know what they are getting themselves into, so pictures, videos, and descriptions of the event as it is taking place help them know that this is something they definitely do not want to miss.
How have you used Facebook to create excitement during multi-day events?