When I launched my podcast – and as an ongoing strategy – I leverage Facebook events to promote upcoming episodes. You can use Facebook Events to promote a variety of in-person and digital events – don't be afraid to promote digital events! While I do talk about launching my podcast specifically in this episode, know that the same applications are true for other businesses!
When you go to your Facebook page your business page, you have the ability to list events that your page is hosting.
And I think often times we get too caught up in the fact that events are things that happen in person, that they're things that you have to physically go to. And that's not always the case. There can be digital events!
When I launched my podcast, the first thing I did was I created a podcast launch event. And to this day, every one of my interview episodes include a Facebook event listing. The reason behind it is this: When you create a Facebook event, you have the ability to tag your guest, list your guest as a co-host and when the guest, accepts the co-host role, that means your event shows up on their page on their business page.
So this could be huge for exposure and for increasing your reach. Furthermore, any time somebody marks that they're interested are going to your event, they're going to be notified when your event is approaching. Typically, it's the day before or the day of, Facebook lets you know that there is an event that you responded to that's happening that day. So this is a great way to remind people about that podcast episode that they've indicated they want to listen to!
Also, if multiple people have responded to an event, that may show up in other people's newsfeeds, I will often see posts indicating that my friends have responded to events that are happening. See how this could help extend your reach?
Now, none of this is an exact science, and the algorithm changes frequently… but it is an ability to potentially reach more people.
I love that my fans can come to my page and browse upcoming guests to get excited about who's coming up soon – and it's visually appealing.
When it comes to ads: You can run engagement ads and then optimize for event responses, and what this will do is optimize that ad to get more people that say that they're going to go to your event, or that they're interested in it. Now, this isn't going to increase your subscribers. It's not directly going to increase your downloads. No, but what it will do is it will help again amplify your reach.
You are going to get this ad this event in front of a ton of people, and they're going to be highly targeted because you're listening to my advice and you are finding your exact people through your targeting and through your audience elections, right?
So your audience is going to be super super strongly targeted, and you're going to serve this event ad out to all of those people. Now, all of those benefits I talked about before will apply! Anybody that says they're interested or that they're going, certain friends of theirs will see that content in their news feeds. They will get the reminders as the date of the event approaches. Other random friends will see notifications announcing that their friends are attending your event.
It puts you on the map. It puts your content in front of other people, and again, you're also promoting your guest and guess what? Guests love that. They love to see that you are promoting them, and it's a win win because it's going to serve your audience in your show as well.
Now, since we're cheating about this topic, I'm going to answer her question that I get asked pretty frequently, and the question is: But if I run an ad, will it decrease my organic reach?
I understand where they concern is coming from, and it's kind of a yes, no answer.
So if you are targeting your page fans when you are running your ad, then it is possible that you will decrease your organic reach during the time that that ad is running because everybody who likes your page is only going to see so many of your posts per day.
So the way to ensure that your reach does not suffer is to exclude people who like your page from seeing your event response ad.
So once you exclude people who like your page, then it's only going to show your ad to brand new people and you're going to get in front of a whole slew of people that aren't familiar with you yet, but are bound to love you!
Now, of course, this strategy does apply outside of the podcasting world. This will apply if you have a local event, you'll just want to make sure to geo-target your audience when you're running ads so that you're only reaching people within your local service area.
It will work if you're having an online summit, if you have a special webinar – I mean anything that is an event – whether it's digital in person, it doesn't matter. You can list it as a Facebook event. You can promote it, and you can benefit from that reach.
I hope this little tidbit has been helpful. Podcasting is definitely on my brain this month… I'm doing a lot with Facebook ads for podcasters, and next week I'm going to take it a step further, and I'm going to talk about some of the other ads that I've been running for myself and for some other podcasters. Next week I am going to review some of the information I will be sharing at PodFest Multimedia Expo this weekend – if you know a podcaster interested in learning more about Facebook Ads – you can share this with them now!