How To Build 'FOMO' For Your Events

Gutted you couldn’t make it to Glasto? Forlorn you couldn’t score a ticket for Florence?

All your friends are going and you won’t be there! You’ll miss the fun, the laughs, the experience, and you’ll have to see everybody else enjoying it via gratuitous selfie postings.

You might not know it, but you’re suffering from FOMO – Fear of Missing Out.

It’s a bad feeling, but if you can harness it for your event, it can do very good things for your ticket sales.

Eventbrite research conducted in the US discovered nearly 7 in 10 (69%) millennials experience FOMO. It’s this fear of missing out on social interactions that drives them to show up, share and engage.

You can make your event a must-not-be-missed experience by following these 6 steps.

Do something cool!

We’ll start here, because it’s an obvious one, but if you want to get people excited, do something exciting! This could be attempting to set a World Record, organising a meet and greet with a celebrity guest, giving out freebies or prizes, or having a quirky feature like networking in a giant ball pit!

The more unusual your event, the more likely you’ll be to get media coverage (social and traditional) and generate buzz, so think outside the box.

Related: Event trends in Europe

Set up a socially integrated event page

Showcase the collective excitement and social conversation surrounding your event by displaying Tweets and Instagram photos on your Eventbrite event page. To pull in content, you simply set up a custom hashtag, such as #besteventever, which you then use in your social media posts.

Eventbrite is also integrated with Facebook, meaning users can sign in to see which of their friends have already signed up to attend your event – a priceless tool for building FOMO.

Work word of mouth

Eventbrite’s ‘Event Discovery Survey’ found that Facebook and word of mouth from friends and family are the top two ways attendees, across all age groups, heard about events they attended (48% and 19% respectively).

Eventbrite supports social sharing by enabling those thinking of signing up for your event to share your event page on Facebook. This way, potential attendees can rally a group of friends together and make your event a major occasion in their social calendar.

According to research we conducted in 2012, every time someone shares an Eventbrite event on social media it drives $3.23 (£2.12) in additional revenue for the organiser.

Incentivise peer to peer sharing

You can turn your attendees into promoters by creating an affiliate programme for your ticket sales. Eventbrite makes this super simple to do by enabling you to set a referral fee for each ticket sold and promote the programme on your event page.

Affiliates receive credit for any ticket sales that come through their unique referral link, and they can track the performance of their link in the stats shown on their Event Affiliate Program screen.

Organise a flash sale

According to data we’ve collected from Eventbrite events, organisers can expect to see a spike in sales when tickets first go on sale and then again, just before the event takes place. This is because people love to procrastinate and wait until the last minute to make their purchase. What can you do to combat this? Organise a flash sale.

Flash sales are a proven method to drive people to purchase. A flash sale is an instant, one time only, time-sensitive discount. Make it a significant discount, offered for a very short space of time, and you will really ramp up the FOMO factor!

This is a great tactic for getting would-be attendees to share the news of your fantastic offer and giving your ticket sales a mid-lifecycle boost. However, a successful flash sale relies on a well-run pre-marketing campaign to alert your audience, so plan carefully.

Tease your audience

Create a tantalising teaser campaign to build anticipation for your event. You can do this via email to your existing database, on social media or on your website. Even announcing the event date and venue can be used to create excitement, as demonstrated by Sherlocked: The Official Sherlock Convention. The organisers started promoting the event before having finalised the details, but told fans to ‘keep the end of April free’.

When they did announce the date and venue it made a great impact, generating 1,231 shares on Facebook and nearly 1,000 shares on Twitter. Later they released details of their official website and then the speakers and VIP guests who would be attending the event.

To further excite fans they recorded a Youtube teaser video with star guest Mark Gatiss, the co-creator and writer of Sherlock, who also plays Sherlock’s brother Mycroft Holmes.

Meanwhile, X Music Festival also harnessed the power of the tease, by releasing obscured images of the artists and acts set to perform. Fans were challenged to guess the identity of one such performer in order to win VIP weekend tickets. In another post, 300 fans had to like and share the image before the organisers would reveal the identity of the performer pictured. The fans could also earn £5 off a ticket by doing so. This is an excellent campaign combining teasers, prizes and incentives for maximum engagement.

Conclusion

It’s time to face the fear and use FOMO to make your event a-go-go! Put the above tactics to work and watch as your event becomes a hot topic.

Not only will you benefit from increased ticket sales, by building excitement you’ll drive more online chatter during and after your event, fixing FOMO in the minds of next year’s would-be attendees!

How do you build anticipation around your events? Share your FOMO-inducing features!