In case you missed it: What the Big Facebook News Feed Changes mean for Event Organisers

Image removed at the request of the owner.

In coming months, Facebook is making significant changes to the News Feed to prioritise “meaningful interactions” among friends and family over posts from brands and publishers.

Organising an event and sharing posts about it on your Facebook page? These upcoming changes will have a detrimental effect on the organic reach of your posts.

To reach the same numbers as you have done in the past for free, you will now need to think carefully about how posts about your event invite comments and interaction and entice your fans to ‘share’ with their friends.

One way to encourage more interaction is to explicitly invite your fans to respond by leaving a comment. Not just a one liner though, Facebook is explicitly ranking ‘long comments’ more positively than short comments.

This new approach will require a more considered process for cross-posting content on your different social media channels.

You may have to invest time and money into creating and publishing evocative content that resonates with your target audience on Facebook.

Basically, for most page owners going forward, a change of tack is required for promoting events on Facebook.

Is there an easy way to create fresh content for your event that in Facebook’s words, “encourage more meaningful interactions between people”?

Yes.

At Assenty we’ve pioneered a platform for promoting an event on social media by inviting questions for the speakers.

Event organisers submit a few details about their event at assenty.com to get a question board, a URL which anyone can post questions to, for free.

Each question is easily shared on social media, as the examples on Twitter and Facebook below demonstrate:

Questions can also be embedded on websites and blogs as demonstrated below:

Question boards themselves can be shared on social media:

In the light of Facebook’s changes to the News Feed algorithm, fresh, topical content like this regarding an upcoming event is likely to have more legs on the social network than a static post and picture about early bird ticket deadlines, for example.

How easy is it to use a question board? It’s surprisingly straightforward.

Try posting a question on this question board following the 3 simple steps below.

How to post your question:

1.Log in with Twitter

    • or

sign up

    • for a free account on Assenty.

2.

    • Visit the

Ask Assenty about new plans question board
3.

    Post your question.

Ready to create your first question board?

You can be up and running with your first question board in minutes.

Sign up for a free Assenty account or log in with Twitter and once you’ve filled in a few details about your event (name, description, URL, hashtag etc), you’ll be presented with a link to your question board.

Questions can be voted on, answered and rewarded, all in real-time, making each one a conversation starter about your event:

Summary:

Going forward Facebook’s News Feed algorithm is less about passive “likes” and more about active “comments”.

Will this have a negative impact on the organic reach of a Facebook page on the social network?

Yes.

Can event organisers mitigate against this negative impact?

Yes. Event organisers will need to invest in creating content that appeals to their target audience of attendees and would-be delegates and will need to explicitly invite them to interact with this content on Facebook for it to reach further within the network.

Event organisers can also consider using a question board to generate fresh content by inviting questions for the speakers on social media before the event takes place.

Do you have questions about social Q&A or question boards?

We’d love to help, do reach out on Facebook or Twitter. You can also check out our FAQ.

Image credit: The Star Online

PUBLISHED ON By chichiin general