- Charging for Facebook events is actually pretty easy
and simple now to set up, but is it worth it?
What's the consumer experience like?
And more importantly,
how long since people are sending the money to Facebook
before they give the money to you?
We'll walk through how to set up a Facebook event,
charge people for it
and all the important details you need to know right now.
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My name is Jerry Potter,
and yeah, it rhymes with the boy wizard.
And in this video, we're talking about charging people
for Facebook events.
Now with no other tools, you can set up a Facebook event,
have people pay and then attend your event,
and it's really, really slick.
So we're gonna walk through how to set it up,
as well as come back and talk about
some important things to know
'cause I've talked to quite a few people
that have done these
and there are some things they love about it
and some things they don't,
so make sure to watch to the end so you get the full story
and then you can move on with your Facebook events.
So one thing that's important to know
is that you can only do this from a Facebook Business page.
You can't do it from a group or from a personal profile.
So you'd go in to create a Facebook event.
So I'm gonna go down here to Events in the tabs here
and then I'm going to click Create New Event.
You choose between Online or In Person,
so you could actually charge for in person events
for this as well.
If you're gonna do online,
you can use Messenger Rooms or broadcast with Facebook Live
or put in a link for Zoom, whatever you wanna do,
so I'm gonna go ahead and say Online.
Then you have this section where you can choose
do you want a General event,
which is what we're mostly used to with Facebook events,
or you could have a Class
where you can actually schedule live classes
and there's some other tools that are involved with that.
So for this tutorial,
I'm just gonna choose General and then Free and Paid,
and of course, we want paid, right?
So we click Paid.
Type in an event name.
You can have up to 100 characters,
but keep in mind on some views,
only the first two or three words will show,
so make sure that you get the most important ones
in there first.
Choose your date.
If you want an end date, you can also choose that.
If it has a location, absolutely put a location in.
Generally, and I'll tell you, it's buggy sometimes,
but generally, with the times you're putting in
are for your local time, okay, so keep that in mind.
Add whatever you're gonna have for the description.
Same thing here.
In some views, only the first couple of lines will show,
so make those the most important.
So don't start off your event by saying
we are so excited for this to happen.
Make whatever the promise of the event is,
you know, food, drink and live bands all on one day.
You know, something like that.
Whatever you want to use to get their attention.
If this was a real event, Teaching Paid Facebook Events,
I would say something like
learn how to create a Facebook event and charge for it
or something like that.
Then you're gonna choose your category.
There's quite a few different ones in here,
so just choose whatever makes the most sense.
You do have to choose from one of their categories
and it just kind of helps them categorize the event
if it ends up getting promoted to other people.
Once you've done that, hit Next.
This is where you're gonna put the price of your event in.
You might see this pop up.
It says you can't create a paid online event
until you add a payout account.
So if you have not already done that,
go ahead and click Setup.
And then, in Facebook Business Suite,
you click this and essentially you'll connect it
to your business or yourself,
so you go ahead and fill all this stuff out.
You'll get to this screen, once you put your information in,
it'll say, okay, do you wanna manually link a bank account,
use PayPal, which often then means you get charged fees,
or use online banking.
So choose whatever is most appropriate for you.
The way connecting your payout account
will look different depending on your bank
and the country you're in and all kinds of stuff like that.
But once you go through those steps,
back in the Facebook event here,
you can choose to have an early purchase discount.
So you could have an early bird price.
So you'd turn that on.
And then you would say, I don't know,
you might say 50% off until
a week before the event, for example.
Also, if your event only has limited space,
in other words, it could sell out,
then you can turn that on and say,
yes, we can only have 50 attendees, for example.
So those are all features you can use
in these paid events in Facebook, which is neat.
When you are all set, hit Next.
Decide how you're going to deliver it.
So if it's a Facebook Live, then you click that one.
If it's an external link,
which I think is what it'll be for most events,
you can click that.
Or if it is going to be at a different location,
then you could choose that
and basically add your information to the details box.
Then I click Next.
By default, it's going to pull the cover photo
from your business page, but if you want,
you can delete that and add a different cover photo.
And then if you want your event
to only be available in certain countries,
then you can toggle that on
and choose the country that you want it to be in.
A few other options, you can click Event Settings.
You can show or hide the guest list.
You can say only admins can post in an event
as opposed to anybody who's attending.
You can add post approval
and then you can also add a messenger button to your event.
That's a good one to turn on
if you think people are gonna ask questions.
And then up here, you can also add co-hosts,
so you have other vendors or things like that,
other business pages,
you can actually have them on here as a co-host
and then they can promote it as well.
So we hit Save.
You can see over here,
it shows the crossed out price with the discount
and limited time remaining because obviously
that's gonna expire and limited capacity 50 spots left.
So they've actually given us quite a few tools
to use when creating our events.
Once you're done, you can save it as a draft,
or if it's ready to go, just hit Publish Event.
You get this pop up
with a few tips about promoting your event.
They'll ask you if you wanna boost your event
and you can go ahead and do that, if you choose to.
But otherwise, now here is the event that we just created.
It's hinting at me that I should write
a more detailed description because I just wrote TBD
since this was just a tutorial.
And then I can click View As Visitor
and it'll show me now what the event
will look like to anyone who is visiting it
and they can mark themselves interested or going.
But you probably wanna add something
to your description that in order to actually go,
they need to click Get Access.
And then on here, they can go in
and actually purchase the ticket to your event.
So that's how you set up your paid event.
Now some other things you should know.
This isn't available in all countries yet,
but the list of countries it is available in is pretty long,
so you can check and see if it's available in your country.
Second, one of the complaints people have
is how long they have to wait for the money.
So here's how this works.
Facebook is obviously taking the payments for you, right?
People put their payment information in
and Facebook collects the payments,
then Facebook is gonna send you the money,
but how long do you have to wait?
Well, what they do is they calculate the money
that you've earned at the end of every month
and then it's paid out 30 days later.
So if you had an event on the 27th of a month,
then they would calculate it at the end of that month
and then you'd get paid 30 days after that.
Now, at the same time,
if your event was on the first of the month,
then they wouldn't calculate until the end of that month
and then you wouldn't get paid for 30 days after that,
so it's almost two like two full months later
before you got the money.
So that's just good to know
if that is something that is important to you.
And there's a couple reasons they do that.
One, internally, they're not gonna like,
you know, sort things and try
and figure things out all the time because they actually
do have people manually looking at stuff.
And we'll talk about that in a second.
But two, if somebody complains to Facebook
and, you know, demands a refund, they wanna make sure
they haven't already sent you the money
if somebody is going to get a refund.
Another thing to know about payments,
they won't pay out until your balance is at least $100.
So at the end of every month, if you have over $100,
they'll send you the money.
If you're sitting there at $37,
they'll wait until you get more money than that
for your event.
So keep that in mind,
depending on what you're gonna charge
and how many people you think are gonna show up.
Also know that Facebook is going to look at the event
and monitor the event before, during and afterwards.
So you have to follow all of their regular terms of service,
community guidelines, all of that kind of stuff.
I'm not gonna go into what's right or wrong on Facebook,
but generally, our guts are pretty good at figuring out
what that's going to be.
Events that you do must be live,
and if you show any pre-recorded video during your event,
you have to identify that it is pre-recorded.
So like, "Hey, I'm gonna show you this video clip,"
basically say that during your live
so that people know and are aware of that.
And final thing to know is the refund policy.
If you change the date at any time,
everybody can ask for a refund, right,
'cause all of a sudden they can't be there.
And then the other thing to know
is anybody can request a refund
up to 48 hours before your event starts.
So if you're okay with all of that,
and other platforms often have similar,
you know, processes and similar systems in place
and similar rules,
but if you're okay with all that,
it can be a really slick way to set up an event,
host it where your people already are, on Facebook,
get paid for it and move on
without having to pay anybody else
to use their third-party tools.
Alright, now for those of you that wanna learn more
about streamlining your social media strategy
to get more results, more buyers,
reach bigger audiences in less time,
I promised a special invitation and this is it.
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Why the things you see others doing on social media
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Why it doesn't matter when you post
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So right now, go to fiveminutesocialmedia.com/streamline.
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fiveminutesocialmedia.com/streamline.
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