crowd.fm Blog

Announcing Yelp Support: Add Your Events to the World's Biggest Local Reviews Site

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:37:19 +0000

We’re happy to announce that crowd.fm now integrates with Yelp, allowing you to effortlessly list your events on the world’s fastest growing local reviews and community website.

With 78 million unique visitors a month looking to discover local restaurants, galleries, bars and night clubs, you can see why it’s in your interest to have your events discoverable on Yelp.

Yelp operates in over 17 countries across the world, including the US, Canada, UK, Spain, France, Germany and Australia, and with their recent acquisition of Qype, we can expect further expansion into Europe and beyond in the coming months. Yelp events are only currently supported in selected major cities. To see if your local city is supported, find and click your location on this page and look out for the “Events” tab in the menu.

Simply activate Yelp support in your crowd.fm account to get started.

7 Sins of Facebook Event Marketing (and How to Avoid Them) - Sin No. 4: Going Quiet

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 13:25:00 +0100

Once you’ve created your event, taken care of the fold, shared it where appropriate and invited some friends, your work is done, right? Wrong! If you want to maximise the chances of your event’s success, it’s important to keep the momentum going and not go quiet. Posting the occasional update will help increase the chance that fans will find out about your event, whilst keeping it fresh in the mind of those who are already interested.

3 Tips for Posting Effective Facebook Event Updates

1. Maximise exposure of your updates by posting to both your Fan page timeline and the event timeline. Don’t forget to include a link back to the event page when posting to your main timeline.

2. Post updates at your convenience with the new scheduled post feature. This way you can line up several posts in one go, and let Facebook take care of posting them for you as the event draws nearer.

3. Encourage comments and likes by keeping it interesting. Whatever you’re posting, try and make it engaging. Reminders in the run-up to the event are OK, but more creative updates will always get you more attention. Maybe your putting on a gig and have received a particularly strange rider from the band. Of course that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t post more generic updates. Things your fans might want to see in your updates: Links to favourable press coverage; Ticket sale updates - if it’s selling out, let people know; Changes to the lineup such as the confirmation of support acts; More details about the event, e.g. set times, curfew, etc; Messages from the performers/artists.

For more tips on promoting your events online, you should also follow us on Twitter here

7 Sins of Facebook Event Marketing (and How to Avoid Them) - Sin No. 3: Invitation Overload

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:00:00 +0100

A new blog series exploring the common mistakes people make with Facebook events, and how to avoid them.

So we’ve discussed the fold and how to share effectively. Next up we discuss the cardinal sin of invitation overload.

INVITE ALL THE PEOPLE!

Go on, own up; I bet one time or another you’ve created an event on Facebook and then proceeded to invite EVERY SINGLE ONE of your friends using some sneaky JavaScript. Or perhaps you simply manually selected them all. Either way, it’s not big and it’s far from clever!

If you want to avoid pissing off your friends, or worse, having them completely ignore your invitations altogether, then you need to be more selective with who you invite. Instead of spamming everyone, you should see yourself as a curator of events, carefully tailoring invites to those who will actually be interested. Your aim is to maximise the level of engagement with your events, and the best way to do this is to target those who are most likely to respond. This may sound like a lot of work, but thankfully there are a few things you can do to make this a piece of cake.

4 Facebook Event Invite Tips

Tip 1. Invite friends by Location, List or Group

By default, the “Invite friends” box lists all your friends, but you can easily filter your friends down by location, friend lists and the groups you belong to. This makes it much easier to target those friends that are most likely to respond to your invitations and means you can skip those friends that are in another city or country.

Tip 2. Organise Your Friends into Custom Lists

You can make selective-inviting even easier by pre-organising your friends into custom lists based on the interests that most align with your events. Just visit your friends page, hover over any friend’s name and you’ll be able to manage their list membership, creating new lists as required. A set of well-thought-out lists will enable you to target specific sets of friends with laser-like precision. You can speed up the process of creating these lists by filtering your friends using the search field at the top of the page.

3. Invite Sparingly, But Do Invite

As important as it is not to spam people with your invites, it’s equally important that you do actually make an effort to invite some people, as event invitations are still one of the best ways to increase your event’s exposure and reach. They also give you a direct line into invitees’ notification stream, as we’ll discuss in a future post.

4. Get Others to Do the Same

As well as inviting your own friends to your events, you should also encourage others involved to do the same, increasing your event’s reach even further.

So there you have it, a few simple tips to help you get the most out of Facebook event invites whilst avoiding being an invite spammer.

Bonus Tip: The Personal Touch

In some cases it makes sense to reach out to particular friends with a direct personal message containing a link to your event rather than an invite. Try and avoid sending these messages to large groups of people however, especially if they do not all know each other. Otherwise you’re just doing another form of spamming, and the inevitable replies will add further message spam to those unfortunate recipients.

Next Week’s Sin: Going Quiet

You should also follow us on Twitter here for more tips on promoting your events online.

7 Sins of Facebook Event Marketing (and How to Avoid Them) - Sin No. 2: Selfishness

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 10:30:00 +0100

A new blog series exploring the biggest mistakes people make with their Facebook events, and most importantly how you can avoid them.

Earlier this week we discussed ignoring the fold and how to craft your event descriptions to work with it. This week’s sin is Selfishness, or more specifically, not sharing enough.

Don’t Be Selfish; Share!

Not sharing is possibly one of the worst thing you can do once you’ve created your Facebook event. You see Facebook will do very little by default to promote your newly created event for you. The most you can expect is a pretty anonymous and unfriendly activity post, unlikely to be seen beyond your own timeline, as illustrated below.

This could be seen as a cynical ploy by Facebook to encourage you to use their Ad system, which although effective, can quickly become expensive. Thankfully, it’s very easy to increase the exposure of your events without spending a penny.

6 Tips for Effective Sharing

Your primary aim with sharing is to increase the reach of your event, and by reach, we mean the number of Facebook users that actually see the event details. You are also trying to encourage engagement, i.e. fans “Like"ing your post, commenting, and most importantly, RSVPing (which we’ll discuss in a later post). The more user activity you can encourage around your event, the wider the potential reach, the higher the impact.

Tip 1. Share yourself

The first place to share your event is on your own fan page. This will increase the chance that fans will see the event on their own timelines. Another good place to share your event to is on the wall of your previous event as those that RSVP’d will receive notification of your post. You should also share it to your own personal timeline, and encourage the other event organisers to do so as well.

Tip 2. Encourage others to share

You might think it a good idea to share your event on related fan pages, for example the pages of the promoter, venue, artists or performers that are on the bill. But because of the way the new Timeline works, this will get you minimal exposure and is not worth the effort. Instead, you should encourage the admins of those pages to share your event for you. This is because a post from them has the potential to be seen by all their fans, whereas a post by you does not.

Tip 3. Embrace and nurture your super fans

You know the ones; they "Like” all your posts, leave comments and are always sharing your status updates. They’re keen to champion your cause so reach out to them; give them preferential or early access to news and encourage them to share and carry your message to their own circle of friends.

Tip 4. Share on groups

Whilst sharing your event on other people’s fan pages will get you minimal visibility, sharing in Facebook groups will fair much better. This is because group members will receive a notification when new items are posted to a group. But remember not to spam every group you’re part of. You should only share with those relevant groups whos members will be interested in your event, otherwise you’ll not only look desperate, but also risk the wrath of the group administrator and being banned altogether.

Tip 5. Sharing using the share button

Apart from pasting a link to the event page directly into a status update, the easiest way to share your event is directly from the event page itself. Click the small cog in the top right-hand corner of your event page and you’ll see a “Share” link. This will give you the option to share your event to various places, including: your own timeline; one of your pages; or a group you are a member of.

Tip 6. Sharing using an @mention

Another little known way to share your events is using the @mention feature. Similar to @replies in Twitter, it’s invoked with the “@” key. But unlike Twitter, it’s not just users you can mention: events, pages and groups can all be auto-linked to right their in your status update. You could use this to mix it up a bit and mention the artists and venues in your status updates as well.

If you found this post useful, make sure you’ve signed up to our mailing list so you don’t miss out on the next post in the series. We’d also love to hear your comments and feedback.

And you should definitely follow us on Twitter here!

7 Sins of Facebook Event Marketing (and How to Avoid Them) - Sin No. 1: Ignoring the Fold

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 13:00:00 +0100

A new blog series exploring the biggest mistakes people make with their Facebook events, and most importantly how you can avoid them.

Welcome to Part 1 of our new blog series. We originally intended to cover this topic in one article, but it quickly became apparent that there was just too much juicy information to cram into a single post. So instead, we’ll be posting a new sin every few days here on our blog. Join our mailing list if you don’t want to miss any of the upcoming articles in the series.

Right, onto our first sin.

Sin Number 1: Ignoring The Fold

We know what it’s like. You’ve been planning your event for months, carefully curated the perfect lineup, done all the research and crafted epic prose, describing your event in such sumptuous detail that all who read will be compelled to attend. And then what happens? Facebook cuts you off before you get into your stride!

It’s easy to let the Facebook event description fold catch you out. Unless your full event description is under 500 characters, Facebook will only show around 270 characters of it, hiding the rest behind a “See more” link, as illustrated above. And the reality is that only a small percentage of visitors will ever click this “See more” link. So it’s crucial that you maximise the impact of the opening sentences, giving visitors just enough information to summarise your event whilst also enticing them to want to see more of what you have to say. We’ve summarised a few things that you should bear in mind when writing your event descriptions to keep you on the right side of the fold.

4 Tips For Writing Event Descriptions That Deal Effectively with the Fold

1. If you can, keep it short! A description less than 500 characters (including spaces, tabs and newlines) is short enough that you’ll avoid the “See more” fold altogether.

2. If a long description is unavoidable, keep the opening paragraph to a short, tight summary. Remember you’ve got just 270 characters before Facebook cut you off, so maximise the impact of what appears above the fold.

3. Beware excessive newlines. This one is often missed. As well as the 270 character limit, Facebook will also cut your description short if there are too many newlines present. In fact, anything after the 6th newline will automatically go below the fold, regardless of how many characters you’ve actually used!

4. Don’t Repeat Yourself. Facebook ensures that your event’s title, date, time and location are all clearly visible at the top of the page, so why waste valuable characters by repeating this information in the description!?

Keep these four things in mind when creating your Facebook events and you’ll never fall foul of the fold again.

Next up in the 7 Sins of Facebook Event Marketing series: Selfishness. Don’t miss a single posts in the series; join our mailing list today.

Announcing SoundCloud Support: Add your Gigs and Shows to Your SoundCloud Profile

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 07:02:45 +0100

We’ve not been resting on our lorals since last week’s launch, oh no. This week we’re happy to announce that crowd.fm has sexy new integration with SoundCloud!

SoundCloud for Musicians, Artists, Venues & Festivals

At last count the popular social audio sharing service had 15 million users and continues to grow at a rapid rate. Bands, musicians and DJs across the globe use SoundCloud to engage with their fans by sharing new tracks and recordings from their performances. But it’s not just for performers and artists — venues and festivals can also use it to promote themselves and their events, and SoundCloud have written a handy guide on how to do just that.

Listing Your Events on SoundCloud with crowd.fm

Once you’ve enabled SoundCloud in your crowd.fm account, you’ll be able to publish your upcoming event schedule directly to your SoundCloud Profile. Your gigs and shows will be listed below your existing profile, and automatically kept up-to-date as the days roll on. As with all our listings, we include a link for each event that is trackable so you can see exactly how many people are visiting your event pages via your SoundCloud page.

What’s Next?

Stay tuned, we’ve got plenty more crowd.fm improvements on the way that will make it even easier to promote your events online.

We're Live - Promote Your Events Online with crowd.fm

Mon, 28 May 2012 15:52:00 +0100

We’re very happy to announce that crowd.fm is finally here!

Our sole aim with crowd.fm is to help you — the event promoter — take your online event promotion to the next level. Because online is very much where it’s at: Event marketeers now see online event marketing as both more important and more effective than print marketing, and research has shown that the simple act of someone sharing your event through social media has a direct and positive impact on ticket sales.

There are a ton of places where you can list your events online and making the most of these listings websites and social media platforms can help you:

Increase the exposure for your events.
Drive word-of-mouth and social sharing.
Build and nurture your audience.
increasing repeat attendance.

All of which helps with the most important thing of all: More people at your events! Of course you know all this already, right?

But It’s All So Much Work!

The trouble is that getting your events listed in all the relevant places can add up to a whole heap of effort. Not to mention monitoring all these listings and keeping them up-to-date with the latest information. And as the number of channels where your events are listed grows, so does the effort required to manage all these online profiles and engage with your audience to build that all important relationship with your fans… Who has the time!?

Here’s Where crowd.fm Comes In

First and foremost, crowd.fm takes the pain and effort out of adding your events to multiple listings and social media websites. How? By doing it for you! Instead of manually and repeatedly filling in the same information on each place you want your event listed, simply add your event details once in crowd.fm, hit “publish”, and it’s automatically (and some might say magically) pushed out to the places you’ve selected. With one click, your events will be added to your Facebook Page, announced via your Twitter profile and listed on major listings sites such as Eventful, Last.fm, Songkick and Upcoming, all for the same effort it takes to list them in a single place. And when you need to make changes? No problem. Simply update the event details in crowd.fm, hit “update”, and all the listings are automatically and instantly updated. It’s really that simple.

And that’s just for starters. We’re already hard at work adding support for more listings sites and social networks to help you get maximum exposure for your events. Soon we’ll be pushing your events to websites such as Bands in Town, Eventbrite, Lanyrd, LinkedIn, Meetup, Plancast, Soundcloud, Yelp, Zvents and more… Because the more places your events are listed, the greater the exposure, the higher the attendance.

And It’s Not Just about Listings

But wait there, crowd.fm is not just a convenient way to list your events online. Here are some of the things we’re working on to make crowd.fm your ultimate online event promotion companion:

Engagement Tools & Messaging — To help you deal with login-overload and avoid RSI, crowd.fm will become the central hub through which you can communicate and engage with your fans and audience across all the websites and social networks where they hang out.

Metrics & Tracking — Because data is power! We aim to give you real, actionable data on how your events are doing online, and not just vanity metrics either. Find out: where people are interacting with your event the most; how much traffic these listings are generating to your website; how your audience is growing, including detailed demographics; and ultimately what effect this is all having on the bottom line for attendance and ticket sales.

More Effective Event Promotion Today

This is just the beginning — crowd.fm will continue to grow and improve to help you get ahead with your event promotion. Sign up now and you will be listing your events across the web in minutes.

Happy publishing,

Tekin Suleyman
Founder, crowd.fm

Manage your Facebook Pages with the new iOS app

Wed, 23 May 2012 17:11:00 +0100

Facebook unveiled its newest app this week that lets you manage your Facebook fan pages from your iPhone.

The Facebook Pages Manager lets you easily post updates, photos and comments to your pages as well as view insights. It sports a familiar interface, closely mirroring that of the main Facebook app. The main thing missing at the moment is messages; there doesn’t seem to be a way to view and respond to messages sent by your fans from within the app. Hopefully this will be rectified in a future update. All in all, a welcome addition that makes it easier than ever to keep your Facebook fan pages up to date while you’re on the move. Download it here.

Automatically Add Your Gigs and Concert Events to Last.fm

Fri, 11 May 2012 13:20:00 +0100

It’s now easier than ever to add your events to Last.fm - We’re very happy to announce that crowd.fm now supports automatic listing of gigs and concerts to Last.fm!

Songkick may be the new kid on the social-music-website block, but Last.fm is still one of the best and most effective ways for music fans to discover new music and (more importantly) upcoming gigs and concerts. With almost 50 million music fans signed up, those of you that promote gigs and concerts really cannot afford for your events not to be listed on Last.fm. And it’s not just about music; Last.fm’s database also includes comedians and comedy shows so you can also use it to promote your comedy events.

Activating Last.fm publishing could not be easier: Simply click the Last.fm logo in your crowd.fm account to authenticate your details and you’re all set to go.

One-Click Publishing to Last.fm

Once activated, listing your events on Last.fm is as simple as a single click. As long as your event has not already been listed there, we’ll add it for you, including all the details you have supplied. To be able to add events to Last.fm they must be music or comedy related, and you must specify the performers and/or artists.

As with all the events we publish, the event listing on Last.fm will include a trackable link back to your website so you can see how many visitors each event listing is generating for you as well as a sense of how popular each particular event is.

What’s Next?

We’re already hard at work adding support for even more places to automatically list your events. With crowd.fm, we aim to make promoting your events online a breeze. Sign-up to take crowd.fm for a spin today.

How to Make Your Brand Page Sing with the New Facebook Timeline

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 23:13:00 +0000

Facebook is bringing the Timeline to Brand Pages very soon. Find out about the changes and how you can update your page to take full advantage of its new features.

This week, Facebook took the first steps towards switching on the new Timeline for Fan Pages. It’s a big change that Page Admins really cannot afford to ignore. At its heart, the new Timeline presents a big opportunity for businesses to improve the way they interact with their audience and gives brands the means to provide a much richer experience for visiting fans. We’ve taken the time to explore the new Timeline, and provide you with a short guide on how best to prepare your Fan Page for the big switch over.

Make a Splash with your Cover Picture

The most prominent feature of the new Timeline is the Cover Picture; a 800x300 pixel image that sits across the top of your page. This is the first thing people will see when they visit your timeline so use it to make an impression. Choose an image that is bold, interesting and represents you best. No sales copy or slogans mind, Facebook doesn’t take kindly to such things. You should save that for the “About” box, which sits just below the cover picture. Here you have free rein to write a short and punchy description that best describes your brand.

Tell a Story by Adding Some Milestones

It’s now possible to reach into the past and highlight key events in your brands’ history with the new Milestones feature. With Milestones, you can create posts from the past, giving you the opportunity to provide fans with rich content like never before. Manchester United have used this feature to great effect on their timeline, which stretches back to the date they were founded as Newton Heath LYR Football Club, way back in 1878. Can you tap the rich heritage of your organisation to create a compelling and engaging timeline for your fans?

Curate your Timeline

As well as being able to add Milestones, the new Timeline also gives you greater control over what your fans see. Your most interesting posts can be highlighted, making them full-page width, especially effective with photos and pictures. You can also choose a single post to “Pin to Top”, meaning it sits at the top of your timeline, no matter when it was posted. This is perfect for those posts that you really want to generate traffic to. On the flip side, you can also hide posts that are no longer relevant, or that you just don’t want your fans to see anymore. So be sure to trawl through your previous posts and pin/highlight/hide as necessary to create an absorbing journey for fans exploring your timeline.

Get your Apps in Order

Page Apps have been moved and now sit just below and to the right of the cover photo. It’s important that you arrange your Apps such that the most important are on display, as you can only have four permanently on view, and even then one of those is reserved for Photos. The rest will be hidden away, only accessible with a click of the tiny arrow. So don’t forget to make that all important Events app visible if you want to give your fans easy access to your upcoming event schedule.

And There’s More

This article only touches on the main highlights of the new Timeline. There’s also: the new Messaging functionality that makes it easier for your fans to send you messages; The in-page Admin Panel, which provides you with an overview of how fans are interacting with your page, right there at the top of your timeline; and the Activity Log that gives you easy access to everything you’ve ever done on your page, handy when you want to find those posts to highlight.

The Switch is Soon, But Why Wait?

On Friday March 30th, all pages will be switched over to the new Timeline, whether you’re ready or not. But you don’t have to leave it until then to get your Page in order - go preview your Timeline now, get your page updated and make the switch!

Update: If you’re really keen, there’s a great post over on the All Facebook blog about some of the additional features we’ve not covered here.

How Facebook's New "Suggested Events" Feature Helps Event Promoters

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:00:00 +0000

A new feature rolled out by Facebook last week aims to help users discover new events, presenting a great opportunity for event organisers and promoters.

Facebook’s new Suggested Events page presents a new way to reach those Facebook users that might not already be aware of your events. It suggests events to users based on their actions: their “likes”; the music they listen to; the places they’ve checked in to; the events their friends are attending. How can you make the most of this new feaure? As always, it’s all about engagement! The more that users interact with your event listings and Fan Page, the more likely it is that users and (more importantly) their friends will see your events. Things to do include:

Make sure attendees confirm their attendance on your Facebook event pages.
Encourage users to share their location and check-in when they are attending your events.

What’s next for Facebook events?

Facebook continue to take both events and location-based sharing seriously. As well as recently tweaking their check-in functionality to make it easier for users to share their location, the worlds largest social network have also just completed the acquisition of location-based service Gowalla. It’s not yet clear how the talented Gowalla team will used to improve the Facebook experience, but rest assured we’ll keep you posted with the latest developments and how best to take advantage of them when promoting your events.

Songkick and Foursquare Hook-up For Events

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 17:52:16 +0100

If you missed the news yesterday, Foursquare and SongKick have announced an exciting new hook-up:Songkick gigs and concerts are now listed on Foursquare!

This is big news for all you promoters and gig/concert venues out there – it means your fans can not only check in at your venue with Foursquare, they can now also check in at the events you run. It’s also another excellent way for people to discover events near them as events appear in the Foursquare app a couple of hours before they start.

Of course, if your events aren’t listed on Songkick, they can’t check in – as we wrote about recently, crowd.fm now makes sure your events are published to Songkick automatically, so now you get Foursquare integration too!

This follows on the YouTube and Soundcloud integration already up and running, all-in-all making Songkick an increasingly essential place to publish your events.

Apply now for an account for your venue, or activate Songkick in your account to get publishing!

New: Add your events to Songkick with crowd.fm

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 11:41:00 +0100

We’re really excited to announce that Songkick now joins Facebook, Twitter, Eventful and Upcoming on our roster of supported sites at crowd.fm, making adding your gigs, concerts and club nights to the fast-growing music discovery service a piece of cake!

Songkick is the site of the moment when it comes to music events. The increasingly popular service helps fans find concerts and music events for the artists and bands that they love. It works by magically tracking their favourite artists and notifying them when they are performing nearby. So as long as your gigs, concerts and club nights are listed there, Songkick will do the hard work and let fans know when artists they like are performing at your events.

Songkick also have a sexy new iPhone app!

And as if that wasn’t reason enough to make sure all your music events are listed on Songkick, they have recently released a beautiful new iPhone app, making it even easier for punters to discover and learn about your events.

One-click publish!

And now listing your music events on Songkick is as simple as one-click. Not only do we make sure your events are listed correctly with their full details, we also do some clever work to ensure duplicates aren’t created – the guys and girls at Songkick wouldn’t like that very much.

So don’t delay – activate Songkick publishing in your crowd.fm account so your events can reach an even wider audience.

There’s more to come…

We don’t rest on our laurels here at crowd.fm – we’re already hard at work on more features to help you list your events in all the places that matter most. So if you don’t have a crowd.fm account and want to increase your audience reach while saving time, sign-up now!

Top 10 Reasons Users Will Unlike Your Page on Facebook

Thu, 26 May 2011 17:01:06 +0100

I just came across an Interesting post over on the Brand Hackers blog on the reasons users unlike brands on Facebook.

It’s definitely worth a read if you want to maximise your fan-base. The key messages are: Don’t over-saturate your fans with too much content; and keep the overt marketing to a minimum – as always, interesting, engaging content wins every time! Read more here.

10 Reasons Why Your Organisation Should Have a Facebook Fan Page & Not a Profile

Mon, 23 May 2011 16:00:00 +0100

If you’re still using a Facebook profile for your venue or organisation rather than a Facebook Page, it’s time to get with the 21st century and make the switch! Pages behave differently to regular profiles and have some clear benefits. Here are the main ones, as well as some tips on making the switch should you need to:

1. Unlimited Fans vs Limited Friends

Facebook profiles are limited to a maximum of 5,000 friends. That might sound like plenty, but it doesn’t take long to build up a large fan-base, and once you’ve filled your 5,000, that’s it! Fan pages however have no such limits and allow you to amass as many fans as you can.

2. Insights & Analytics

With Facebook Pages, you get access to Facebook Insights, a powerful set of metrics for your page and content that helps you analyse trends and expand your reach. We’ll have more information on getting the most out of Facebook Insights over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

3. It’s the Rules!

Facebook are very clear in their Terms of Service: Profiles are for people; Pages are for businesses, places, things and organisations. Setting up your business as a profile rather than a Page is in direct violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service and your account may be disabled, losing all your hard-earned fans in the process. Don’t worry if you are already set-up as a profile though, point number 10 explains how you can easily convert an existing profile to a Page.

4. Facebook Adverts

Facebook now has a powerful advertising platform that allows you to target potential customers based on their age, location and interests. It integrates perfectly with Pages, allowing you to direct users to your Page or events on your Page based on very specific metrics – perfect for when you want to give one of your events that little extra push to sell a few more tickets.

5. Location/Check-in for Venues

If you register your Page as a location, Fans will be able to “check-in” at your venue, creating another way for your fans to interact with you on Facebook, deepening your relationship and increasing your visibility to them and others in the process. See our previous post on claiming your place for your page for more details.

6. crowd.fm Only Works with Pages!

That’s right, if you want to use crowd.fm to streamline your event promotion, then you need to be set up as a Fan Page!

7. Pages Are Easier to Maintain and Build Fans Faster

Facebook Pages are intrinsically easier to maintain as you don’t need to confirm friend requests as you do with profiles. Fans that “Like” your Page instantly get your updates in their news stream without you having to do a thing. You’ll also find that building up fans is much quicker as a Page because Facebook users are more likely to “Like” a Page than they are to make a friend request to a business set up as a user profile.

9. Pages are More Visible in Search Engine Results

Facebook’s privacy rules mean that user profiles are not fully indexed and shown in search-engine results, whereas pages are. So if you want to maximise your exposure, it’s got to be a Page.

9. Pages Are Less Spammy

One thing you can do as a user profile that you can’t as a Page is directly message your friends. It would be easy to see this as an advantage, but be warned, excessive broadcast messaging of Facebook users is a surefire way to annoy them. At best, they will become desensitised to your messages and ignore them in future; at worst they will unfriend you for good!

10. It’s Now Easy to Convert to a Page From a Profile!

There’s now no excuse for using a profile for your venue or organisation as Facebook now provides a tool that helps you convert an existing profile to a Page: See this help page for more details. It’s also worth reading this blog post for some more details about the conversion process.

Facebook app now support check-in at events!

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 10:52:00 +0100

Have you claimed your Facebook Place yet? Well now there is even more reason to do so - Facebook have updated their App for iOS (iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches) with a new feature: check-in for events!

Facebook users can now check themselves and their friends in, as long as they have RSVP’d as attending and are at the location at the time of the event. It also lets them see other friends that have checked in.

The Facebook app for android hasn’t been updated yet, but it can’t be far behind.

This bringing together of Facebook Places and Events is a neat little social enhancement that creates even more ways for fans to interact and engage with your events. So don’t miss out - get your events published and make sure your Fan Page and Place are set up correctly!

Get the latest version of the Facebook iPhone app to try this feature out.

Venues - Have you claimed and merged your Facebook Place?

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 14:09:00 +0100

If you’re a venue and you hold events, chances are someone has already registered your venue as a Facebook Place. But did you know you can claim the place as your own? More importantly, once claimed, you can then merge your Facebook Place with your Fan Page.

This will give you a combined Fan and Place Page with the Place functionality built in, which means fewer things to manage, a more consistent experience for users, and also means more fans for your venue - your Fan Page will automatically inherit any fans of the Place! Get all the lowdown on claiming your Place and merging with your Fan Page from the Facebook Help Centre.

Bonus tip: Claim your Eventful venue too!

Did you know that you can also claim your venue on Eventful? Doing so not only gives you more control over how your venue is listed, but also lets you manage (i.e. remove!) all those nasty duplicate event listings created by ticketing services and so direct visitors to your own listings and box office links. Just look for the “Claim this venue!” box in the sidebar of your venue profile page.

Make your Facebook fan page more visible to your fans

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 13:48:00 +0000

With over 500 million users (and counting), Facebook is a phenomenon that just cannot be ignored, and building up a fan-base with your own Facebook fan page offers a fantastic opportunity to reach out to your audience.

But with the average Facebook user having 130 friends and “liking” as many as 80 pages [1], chances are few of your posts will actually be seen by your fans.

This is because Facebook employs a secret sauce of clever algorithms called EdgeRank that tailors a selective, personal news feed for each user based on their interactions. And although no-one outside of Facebook knows exactly how EdgeRank works, there are some clues [2] and enough anecdotal evidence [3] to give us an idea of how Facebook chooses the posts that end up in users’ news feeds, and thus work out what you can do to increase your chances of being seen.

Here’s a quick rundown of some things you can do to give your fan page a boost and maximise your visibility with your fans.

Encourage interaction

Encourage fans to interact with your posts by posting engaging and interesting content. This is because the more “likes”, comments and viewings a particular post gets, the higher its EdgeRank and so the more likely it is to appear in the feeds of your fans.

Sharing a link works better than a plain status update, and photos and videos work better still as Facebook tends to favour content with which a user can easily interact. Every time a fan views a photo or watches a video, its EdgeRank will increase. Also, Facebook prefers to include photos and videos in users’ news feeds to keep them looking interesting.

Engage with your fans

Facebook is all about relationships so make sure you are actively engaging with your fans. If a fan takes the time to post something to your wall or comments on one of your posts, be sure to respond — developing a dialogue with your fans not only helps your EdgeRank, but also fosters positive relationships and increases the chance that fans will interact with you again in the future.

Persuade people to share your posts

You can extend your reach by encouraging your fans to share your postings. Or take matters into your own hands by sharing fan page posts with your friends, and by asking friends and other members of your organisation to do the same. This will get your posts in front of more fans, but more importantly, in front of users that might not already be fans! Do this sparingly however, as too much sharing can put people off.

Quality, not quantity

The number of times you post has absolutely no baring on the chance of any given post appearing in news feeds, so when it comes to your visibility, quality counts over quantity every time. Also, it’s better to spread your posts out over a period of time rather than post several all at once, maximising the chance of your posts being seen on any given day.

Age does matter after all!

Facebook will tend to favour the posts of pages that have been around the longest so don’t delay in setting up your Facebook fan page if you haven’t got one already!

Page views also count

Also charmingly known as the “stalker factor”, the more a particular user views your fan page, the more likely it is that your posts will feature in their personal news feed. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective!), this doesn’t work the other way round — no matter how much you view the profiles of your fans or friends, you will not increase the chances of your posts appearing in their news feeds. Encourage people to visit your page by making sure you have a link to it from your own website and by adding it to your email signature.

The different types of feed and why timing is important

At the moment, there are three different Facebook news feeds: Top News; Most Recent; and the Live Feed. Top News is the hardest feed to get featured in and tends to lists posts from the last few days based purely on EdgeRank. The Most Recent feed lists a selection of recent posts in chronological order, but again only displaying those with a high EdgeRank. The Live Feed however, which is currently only displayed on mobile apps such as those for Android & the iPhone, is a completely unfiltered chronological list of posts. This means that the majority of your posts will begin life on the mobile phones of your fans, so it’s a good idea to post at a time of day when they’re likely to be checking Facebook on their mobiles.

It’s not a popularity contest (although the popular users are the hardest to reach!)

Obviously the more fans you have the better, as you’ll have a bigger potential audience for your posts. But in terms of increasing the chances of your posts appearing in the feeds of your fans, your popularity has no bearing. On the other side of the coin, those fans that have lots of friends are less likely to see your posts, simply because you’re competing to be seen amongst more posts!

Keep at it!

It can take time to build up the presence of your Facebook fan page, so don’t be disheartened if your posts initially go unnoticed. But if you continue to post interesting, engaging and relevant content to your fan page, your fans will eventually start to take notice and your presence in their news feeds will gradually increase.

What's New?

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 20:41:00 +0000

Despite the radio silence here, some excellent progress has been made over the last few weeks in both existing and new areas of crowd.fm. We thought we’d take the opportunity to highlight a few of these changes, and to give you an idea of what’s coming next.

Improved Publishing Mechanism

The first major change you’ll notice is the improved publishing interface. This now gives more control over how events are published and to which sites, and more gracefully handles feedback and any problems which might (but hopefully won’t) occur. If you just want to get the word out quickly to all your listings sites, you can do so with a click of the big blue button to publish or update an event. Alternatively, you can selectively update any of the sites you have set-up. In both cases you’ll get clear feedback as to what’s happening, and any potential problems which might occur. Publishing happens in the background and you’re free to use the site normally while it’s happening.

Here’s an example:

Tracking Activity

There’s now a new “Activity” area to help give an overview for publishing activity from your account. This is the best place to get an overview for what’s been published through your account recently, to where and when.

Event Statuses

We’ve also introduced some UI changes to how different statuses of events are displayed. Successfully published events are now shown as green, events which need updating at listing sites (because changes to their details have been made) are amber, and events with issues (for example, a failed publishing - hopefully a rare situation) are shown as red. In addition, we now highlight the latter two in a few places so you’ll be prompted to take action (ie. update where appropriate or re-attempt publishing).

Improved Dashboard

All of these have meant we’ve been able to make the Dashboard a better jumping point into your current events and to give you a better overview of what’s fresh.

What’s Next?

As you can hopefully see, we’re beginning to establish a powerful platform for managing your events, and we plan to keep evolving it with your help and feedback. The next major feature we are planning is (drum roll!) Twitter integration. This will allow you to send customised tweets about your events at suitable times and spread the word to the Twittersphere automatically. We’re pretty excited about this one.

Over To You…

As ever, we’d love to get your feedback on any of these new features - existing users, please , and new users can apply for a beta account here.

Birth!

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:04:00 +0100

It’s been a long time coming, but crowd.fm is finally starting to emerge from a long gestation period! Our wonderful beta testers are putting us through our paces and we’re tweaking, refining and improving things in anticipation of a public launch sometime in the not so distant future.

So what exactly is crowd.fm? As you can begin to see from the sneak peak screenshot above, our aim is to build the ultimate promotional tool for venues and event promoters of every kind – your one-stop shop for publishing, promoting and keeping track of your events across the web. On the surface, we give you the power to publish your events to multiple listings and social networking sites with a single click. But we aim to do much more than that, by making it easy for you to engage with audiences through social media and beyond. We’ve got big plans so watch this space! In the meantime if you want to get an early glimpse of crowd.fm then head over to our site and apply now to be a part of our beta testing programme.