Several weeks ago we used Facebook Events to help a B2C company market their Wine Tasting Event in California using Facebook Events. And the problems start early with the user interface and upload of the creative images you want to use.  In fact, the top of the image is masked by the Facebook Business Manager banner which prevents you from experiencing a complete preview.

In our case, even the Mobile version of the Creative was off center on an iPhone 6 Plus which has one of the largest screens on a Mobile Phone. We had to move the content towards the center for the entire line of short text to be visible. One recommendation here would be to offer a Mobile Preview.

Say assume you survived the limitation of the creative and now you want to market the hell out of the Event to make it very successful. But here’s where Facebook Event falls way short of what is possible. For starters, you are not able to invite anyone who is part of a Facebook “Custom Audience”. And if that was not bad enough, you will not be able to invite a “Saved Audience” either.

In our case, we had created a custom audience of the previous customers for a client, but we were NOT able to invite them. Even if you were ambitious enough to look up the profile of more than 1,000 people, you would be limited to sending them messages since the Invitations are restricted to Friends only.

Disappointed with the invitation options, we decided to market the event using Facebook Ads. And the results of the ad’s performance despite targeting high-income clients were not successful either. The results of the advertising of the Event are shown below:

Results   Reach  Cost     Amount Spent

  10     4,992  $7.09     $70,86

   6     2,344  $6.24     $37.43

    6    1,688 $3.53       $21,16

As you can see the results are less than ideal and would not impress an Event Planner or corporate marketing teams who might have considered using Facebook Events. The final number of these 3 Facebook Ad campaigns is here:

• 7,200 Reach
• 141 Viewed
• 38 Responded
• 29 Interested
• 7 Went

Needless to say that when it comes to advertising for Mobile, Facebook has nailed the product down that offers amazing reach, targeting and conversions. Perhaps that’s why in comparison Facebook Event leaves a lot of work to be done.

In short Facebook Events team can:

• Offer Mobile Preview option

• Add more options to Invitation Tabs than just ONE friend at a time

• Add Support to respond to multiple users who have expressed interest in attending an event.

• Add support option for follow-up with the respondents till they are confirmed for the event. 

What do you think? Have you used Facebook Events?