using facebook for marketing campaigns

Webinars continue to be an important part of B2B marketing campaigns, especially as budgets get tighter and expensive high-touch field marketing events fall by the wayside. Whether you call them “online education”, “virtual events” or something else, you still have to drive people to attend.

A few years ago, we had a wildly successful “online education” webinar program at JBoss. Twice per month, we would feature a different technical topic, presented by one of our core developers, explaining some cool new feature or technology in a hands-on training type of way. We could have anywhere between 50-150 people show up to the live events, and thousands more watching the archived versions. And in hindsight, the invitation process that seemed so simple it was nearly automatic was actually quite unique. We’d simply send a single invitation email, to our in-house list of registered community members, and people would register. The catch? That list was huge – nearly 150,000 people who had opted in to our communications specifically.

So what do you do when you don’t have a list like this? There are new ways to engage with our target audience via social media. One of the ways we’re exploring is how to use Facebook groups and event invitations to spread the word about our webinar program.

The screenshot above is from an invitation published today via our Facebook group. Anyone who is a member of our group, or a fan of WSO2, will receive the invitation. Since we started using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to promote our webinars, our attendance has gone up 50% on average. (This could be due to the subject matter, but for the sake of argument I like to think we’re better targeting, and reaching more of, our audience.)