Facebook Events for Something That Happens Every Week

The same event, every week

Every Sunday evening, somebody at the business creates next week's Facebook events: trivia on Tuesday, a beginners' class on Wednesday, live music on Friday. Same titles, same descriptions, new dates.

Over a year that is well over a hundred events, each with its own page, its own handful of people marked interested, and its own chance of a mistyped time.

The website, meanwhile, says to follow the business on Facebook to see what is on.

The weekly events are the most predictable thing the business does. They are being published as if they were news.

What a weekly event actually is

Something that happens every Tuesday at seven is not news. It is part of your opening hours, closer to a menu or a timetable than to an announcement.

Customers want to learn it once and rely on it: trivia is Tuesdays, the market is Saturday mornings, the beginners' class runs Thursday evenings except in August.

What changes occasionally are the exceptions: a cancelled week, a holiday, a special edition with a guest. Those are news. The routine is not.

What goes wrong with a new event every week

• Every copy is retyped, so times, prices and details drift.
• Each event expires and moves into a list of past events.
• Interest is spread thinly across dozens of separate event pages.
• Search engines see a pile of near-identical pages, mostly out of date.
• Links shared last month lead to events that already happened.
• Somebody has to remember every week, including holidays and sick days.

The fifth catches customers most often. A friend shares last month's trivia night, the date has passed, and the reader cannot tell whether trivia still runs at all.

One schedule at one address

The alternative is a schedule page on your own site that describes the routine once: what happens, which day, what time, what it costs, whether to book, and who it suits.

Its address never changes, so it can go on posters, table cards, the newsletter and the Google listing, and still be right next year.

Changes go in a box at the top: no trivia on Christmas Eve, the market moving indoors in November, a guest host this Friday. Each comes off once its date has passed.

Write each entry for somebody who has never been: how long it runs, whether to come as a team, whether newcomers are welcome. Regulars skip that part; newcomers decide on it.

The routine underneath stays put, and nobody retypes it every Sunday.

Facebook events as copies

Facebook events still do something a website cannot. People who mark themselves interested get reminders, and their friends may see that they plan to go.

So use them where that reach matters: a holiday special, a season opener, a guest night. One good event a month does more than four routine ones.

End every event description by pointing to the schedule page for the regular weeks, and put the same link in the page's About section.

For the routine itself, a pinned post linking to the schedule does the job without fifty-two copies.

A worked example

A board game cafe near a college campus runs the same three things every week: a learn-to-play night on Tuesdays, a card game tournament on Thursdays and a family morning on Sundays.

For two years the manager created all three as Facebook events each Monday, and the website's events section showed them through a plugin that pulled events from the Facebook page.

The plugin stopped showing anything after a change on Facebook's side, so for weeks the site said there were no upcoming events. And one Thursday event, copied from an old one, carried last season's entry fee for a month.

Both problems had the same cause. The only record of the routine was a stack of separate Facebook events, each copied from the last.

The cafe built a plain schedule page: each weekly night with its day, start time, price, age range and whether to book a table, and a box at the top for this week's changes.

Facebook events are now created only for the monthly tournament final and holiday specials, each linking to the schedule. The plugin was removed.

Helping Google find the schedule

Google shows upcoming events in its results when a website describes them with event markup, a few lines of code giving the name, date, time and place in a form search engines read directly.

That suits special events with a date. For the weekly routine, plain text with days and times in words is what lets a search for game night in your town find it.

Mention the routine in your Google My Business description too, and use event posts on the listing for special nights; they stay up until the event ends.

Keeping the page current

A schedule page drifts if it is hard to edit. Whoever used to create the Facebook events should be able to change the box at the top from a phone in a minute.

Make that the Monday routine in place of the event-making. It takes less time than the copies did.

Once a season, read the whole page against what actually happens. Prices and start times move quietly.

The counter-case

Some weekly things genuinely suit Facebook events.

A business whose weekly night changes every time, with a different band, guest or theme, is publishing real news, and an event each week makes sense if the schedule page carries the regular slot.

A business with one weekly event and a busy Facebook following may keep posting it, as long as the website says the same thing in permanent form.

For anything that is simply the same each week, though, the original belongs on your own site, and Facebook carries copies that point to it.

Before next Sunday

1. List every weekly event you post on Facebook.
2. Write each one once on a schedule page.
3. Put this week's changes in a box at the top.
4. Link the schedule from Facebook and your listing.
5. Keep Facebook events for special dates only.
6. End each event description with the schedule link.
7. Read the whole page once a season.

Step two is the one that ends the weekly retyping. Once the routine is written down at a permanent address, Facebook events become optional extras rather than the only record.

The same problem with a whole class timetable is covered in a yoga studio site where the schedule lives on Facebook.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.