1. Be sure your promotion is posted from an account that allows public sharing.  This is very important!  We’ve encountered many promos we could not share simply because we did not have the permissions to share to our public page.   If you are using your personal page/newsfeed for your post, FB will prevent sharing to anywhere outside your friends unless you’ve opened up the permissions for your personal page.  Instead, post to your “public page” so that others can freely share it to their friends or to other public pages or groups – like our Go Listen Live page for example.  If you don’t have a public page yet, consider creating one today!
2. Include the date and time in your promotion. Simply saying “Tonight” or “Tomorrow Night” can be confusing because you don't know when people will see your post - it could be many days after you post it. Don’t make your audience do the calendar math in order to figure out when you were referring to.   Remember, Today and Tomorrow Night will be a valid reference every day for eternity…  Even worse, not putting any date/time directly in your promotion forces your audience to start digging around – and you risk having them skip right over your promotion!
3. Clearly state “Live Music” prominently in your promotion. This is important if you want to catch those pesky speed-skimmers and get them to spend a few extra seconds to check you out.  This is the main reason you are creating a promo, right?  Don't bury the lead!  There are other kinds of music events out there that you want to distinguish yours from, such as DJ, karaoke, juke box... 
4. Include the name and address of the location in your promotion. Sure, the place may be well known to everyone that knows about it, but if you are trying to reach new customers that don’t know about the place, even just adding the name and city can make a difference.  Southern California is a big area with endless entertainment options, help your audience quickly target where this event is.
5. Include the band or musician name. If you are the band or musician this is a no brainer, if you are the venue, your audience is interested in this too!  And it's just good karma for venues and musicians to cross-promote each other.
6. Include an image/graphic that screams (or at least politely shouts) that this is about live music. Try to avoid posting “text only” promotions (the kind without any graphic) as these types of posts are easily overlooked in the already very busy newsfeed – especially by the speed-skimmers!   If you are a band or musician, you should already have images of yourself you can use.  If you are a venue, there are plenty of free stock images out there of generic bands, musicians or even just instruments that will give your promotion the “look at me, I’m about music!” appeal.  Or maybe just include a picture of your stage as the backdrop for your promotion information!  And be sure to include your logo, don't overlook the basics of building brand recognition.
7. Include all of the info from above directly in your graphic. Turning your promotion into a single graphic with all the info included will quickly turn your once text promo into pure candy for your audience.  But don't go crazy to the point that people need to study your promo to figure it out.  We've seen the use of crazy fonts that are nearly impossible to read...
8. Create a template and reuse it. Once you fine tune your graphic promo, don’t hesitate to reuse it!  And this will also help your growing customer base quickly spot your promos in their busy newsfeeds as they learn to recognize yours!  But hey, if you’ve got the talent and time to create new promo graphics all the time, more power to you – we love those too!  Just be sure to reuse a commmon element, like your logo to build recognition, and sanity check by using the "total stranger" perspective to make sure you captured all the details.
9. Create your promo as a FB Event! By doing this you can help drive engagement using built-in features, such as allowing people to select “Interested” or “Going”.  Once they select one of these options FB will add your event to their personal “Upcoming Events” page.  Now they will have your event listed in their upcoming events, making it much easier for them to remember and see that your event is coming up!  This is a significant advantage for both you and your target audience and increases the chances they will attend your event.  BONUS POINTS - Did you know that creating events also helps live music advocates such as Go Listen Live extract your events from FB and share it outside of FB, like to a website?  Now your events can be shared to the world outside of FB!  Here's a really cool example of how FB events are pulled to a website: LocalLiveMusic.US.  Our own website is also pulling FB events to a dedicated page!

Hopefully you will find some of these tips helpful.  We know it seems like a lot to do for every single promo.  We get it, it’s hard to take care of all the other things going on in your busy world, so only do as little or as much as you can when creating your promos.  The fact that you’ve even read this far is super impressive!  We think that with practice and repetition these tips will become second nature and much easier over time. 

Feel free to leave comments on our FB page using the button below, we are still learning too and welcome your feedback!

Thanks!!!