Marketing tools are great… especially when they’re easy and free. They can’t do you very much good, however, if they’re completely overlooked. One tool that is surprisingly ignored by brands in all industries, is one that can reach up to 93% of your prospective customers, costs you absolutely nothing, and can be a helpful resource for any number of things – Facebook Events. That little unused tab that looks like a calendar icon on your Facebook page can actually be a great resource for:
- Special events or promotions – use Events even for your regular discounts and promotions; genuine content is always good for your social SEO and brand exposure
- Strategic partnerships for those events – tag those who are working with you… they’ll probably be willing to return the favor!
- Viral and word-of-mouth marketing – make your event shareable and let people ask questions on the event wall
- Resource planning for your event/promotion – give people a solid reason to RSVP and you’ll be better able to plan for your event!
As with everything social, the better it looks, the farther it will travel and the more enticing it will be… we were working on an event picture for a client’s Facebook page and found that Facebook changed the size of the graphic used for Facebook Events. To help you with your events, we’ve added a PSD template and jpg picture that will help you make better Facebook Event headers. Now events now have image headers that are more banner-shaped, like personal profile pages. The size of the headers are 714px wide by 264px tall in size. The event’s thumbnail is generated by cropping out the sides of the image and concentrating on the center of the image.
Something to keep in mind is that there are two types of thumbnail images that can represent your event. The first one is a square that is 200px by 200px that is used when you post an event on a page, timeline or on your news feed. The second one is the part of the graphic that will replace the calendar icon and serve as your tab cover for the events tab; the specs on it are 111px wide by 74px tall. The best suggestion that we can offer is to keep your most important content, such as the headline and the date, in the top middle of the event header. Without being accurate to the pixel, this will ensure that the most enticing/important information is represented in the thumbnail.
Again for designers please keep the picture sharp, below 4MB and at 72DPI. You will be surprised on how many people try to upload a 9MB file to Facebook!
