How to promote your hotel’s events through Facebook

Hotel events can be significant drivers of revenue, not only through bookings, but venue hire and food and beverage sales as well.

If your hotel has the facilities to host events, it’s a worthy endeavour. However, you need to make sure the effort is worth it by attracting as many attendees as possible.

One of the ways you can draw attention to the events at your hotel is through Facebook promotion. Almost 2 billion people use the social media platform, making it the perfect spot to advertise.

Here are some easy to follow tips on how Facebook can optimise your hotel event:

Create a Facebook event page

More than 550 million people are using Facebook Events each month, meaning the potential to attract interest is quite high, even if your page itself is low on followers.

Ideally you will want to create the event page some time before the event takes place, especially if it’s ticketed. This way you have more opportunity to build interest and sell tickets.

There are four benefits of creating an event page:

• You easily invite guests from your friends list to the event

• It makes your event discoverable to friends of attendees

• People going to the event will get reminders prior to the event so they don’t forget
• If you partner with anyone for the event, you’ll also have access to the traffic they bring in

To setup your event properly, take note of these simple tips:

• Have a large cover image, preferably 1920 x 1080 pixels
• Categorise your event correctly. Is it a conference, meet-up, concert etc?
• Add as much data as possible, so Facebook can use its algorithm to recommend the event to other users

The potential to attract interest is quite high, even if your page itself is low on followers

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Promote the event on your timeline

It might seem obvious, but you need to be vigilant in promoting your event on your own page leading up to the date of occurrence. There are a few ways you can do this:

• Create content to support the event. Relevant and interesting content to engage viewers can work very effectively in getting people to sign up for your event. When you post related content, always include a link to your event website or page.
• Run a contest. To build awareness and interest in the event you can hold a contest to give away free tickets or put people in a prize draw to be awarded on the day. This will further help broaden the reach of the event.
• Share the co-hosts content. If you’re joining with any other companies for the event, be sure to share their posts and make sure they’re sharing yours as a mutual benefit to both parties.
• Use a shorter event name. Since 54% of Facebook users only use it through mobile, you want an event name that won’t be cut off on their screen.

Run an advertising campaign

Facebook allows you to create adverts specifically for events. Use ads to target users whose preferences match your event, or people in the local area who aren’t already connected to you. You can also use retargeting on people who have shown interest but have not yet confirmed their attendance.

Browse these posts to learn more about how Facebook can help your hotel business.