Event response audiences on Facebook allow you to precisely target and provide further messaging to people that clicked ‘going‘ or ‘interested‘. They are insanely powerful. 

Woe Be The Facebook Event

Facebook events have a reputation, a bad one. 1,000 people say they’re ‘going’ or ‘interested’…yeh, expect like 10 people to actually rock up. To be fair, is that Facebook’s problem or society’s? Either way, anyone that has ever run a Facebook event knows that the number of people that say they’re coming rarely correlates to those that actually attend.

Like even to my birthday…seriously, guys.

Connection Targeting Vs Event Response Audiences

In the past, you were able to target people who had responded to your event through the ‘connection targeting’ feature on Facebook.

The difference this time around is that you’re able to create custom audiences of event responders (in the same vein as traffic, email, video etc) port these on to campaigns and use them across different objectives.

The bigger deal, is that you’re able to group events over time. Say you have several similar events, you can now group and create audiences out of these.

Better yet, you can create extended lookalike audiences from them. Even better yet, Facebook is allowing you to backdate – you can go back as far as please and create audiences from events that you have previously made.

Immediately Access Key Prospects

Why is this so good? As any digital marketer will tell you the core of achieving strong ROI is getting your content/messaging in front of the right traffic stream. Now for the cost of $10 Facebook is literally enabling you to directly target 1,000 people (assuming a CPM of $10) that have expressed or previously expressed an interest in your event.

High Value Prospect Bidding

These 1,000 people are high value. You should be happy to spend $50 to ensure that you reach them all. When we run campaigns to event response audiences we switch to manual bidding/daily unique reach. We have tried using impressions but find that the campaigns stall, and Facebook increases frequency to a small slither of the reachable target audience irrespective of our manual bid. We want to reach those people, but not annoy a small bunch of them.

Go ahead, try for yourselves – and happy ROI!

– Rukmal
Co-founder of The Plus Ones, Rukmal lives and breathes digital marketing