Step-By-Step Facebook Event Sharing

The Sprocket Report

We're sorry to report that as of July 2017, these techniques are no longer possible. Read more about it from Facebook. We have suggestions for what you can try now.

Connecting with your local community helps you become a business people know, like and trust. Sharing community events on your Facebook page is one way to do that. Here is our step-by-step guide for effective event posts.  

First, we have to warn you that many organizations will make it harder for you than it needs to be. It’s counterintuitive, but often planners are so busy with all the details of their event that they don’t notice the hiccups in their social media marketing. We’ll show you how to fix some of those hiccups.

For our example, we went to the Naperville City Events Calendar. It’s a great place for organizations to promote their events and a great resource for Naperville businesses to learn what’s happening in the community. Many cities have similar community calendars at their own city websites.

On the website’s calendar page, we see that on June 4 there is a Kite Festival presented by the Naperville Moms Network. That sounds like a fun event to share! So we copy the URL of that event page and paste it in our business page’s Status box.  

Facebook recognizes the link and brings up a description and an image associated with that page. Unfortunately, there’s not much of a description image and not an image at all. This post probably would not attract much attention and we want people to know about this event.

So we go back to the City Events website page and see that in the details of the calendar item, there’s a website link to the Naperville Park District where they have a page called “/kitefly” which may have more information and images.

Clicking on the link takes us to a Park District page all about the Kite Fly Festival. It’s colorful and fun-looking and has some info on what families can expect to see and do at the fest so it seems like a better link to share on Facebook. Again, we copy the URL and paste it into the Status box on our Facebook business page.

When the URL is recognized, Facebook provides three different image options:  The Park District logo, a Kite Festival poster and a sponsor ad.

The Kite Fest one in the middle is the most appropriate choice. We can hide the other two images by clicking on each one in the Available Images section at the bottom until only the Kite Fest image remains available.

Facebook rearranges how the post will look now that there is only one image. It also shows the title and description provided by code in the webpage. Unfortunately, the title isn’t very catchy and the description is generic to the whole website rather than specific to the Kite Festival page.

But we can fix both of those. When we click in the title field, we can delete what’s there and type in something more appropriate. The same goes for the description field. Be aware, however, that each field will only allow a limited number of characters and will cut off the overflow text.

It would be easy to just cut and paste the info text from Kite Fest web page, but we are unfortunate once again. The web page features just a big image of the Kite Fest poster. Since it’s only a picture of the text instead of actual text, we can’t highlight the text to cut it. We’ll need a few extra minutes to re-type the text before inserting it into the description field.

We can remove the long and ugly URL in the Status box, but the link to the web page will remain active so readers can just click on the post to go to the Kite Fest page. In the now-blank Status box, we’ll write a message for friends and colleagues to see when we share this event on our Facebook page.

A great perk of Facebook business pages is that you can schedule when you want the post to be live. Looking at our Facebook Insights, it looks like 12:00pm is when the most people are on our page, so we’ll schedule this Kite Fly post for Thursday around that time. Now it’s listed in our Scheduled Posts.

But now we see that the image, that Kite Fly poster, doesn’t look as nice as we’d like because Facebook is showing just the center of the graphic. Both the words and the kites are cut off. Instead, we’ll crop just a portion of the poster and save it, the part that shows the kites.

Once a post is scheduled, we can edit the text in the Status field, but we can’t edit the graphic images or text that is associated with the URL link. So, we delete this post entirely and start all over again. This time, after we have posted the URL in the Status box, we’ll add our own image to the choices by clicking on the square with the plus sign under Available Images. From there, we’ll upload the cropped image we want to use.

Then we go through the same steps:  Choose the image, Rewrite the title, Rewrite the body text, Delete the URL in the Status field, Write a message in the Status field, Schedule the post.

So what have we learned?

1. We learned how to make a shared Facebook post more interesting for our readers.
2. We learned that social media work requires a little more thought and effort than a lot of folks can give.
3. We also learned that if you want to get the word out about your event on social media, you might want to make it easier for people to share it. 

The Sprocket Website team is in the trenches all the time so if you have questions about how to put an event on your webpage or how to use Facebook to promote it, just give us a call. We’d be happy to help.  

Kate GingoldKate Gingold

I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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Full biography

I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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