Facebook Advertising

Community
#1

Paging especially @Ryan_Paddy, but possibly of relevance to other folks - a while ago Ryan ran an advertising campaign on Facebook which garnered quite a bit of interest; how do you go about that? Is it particularly hard to set up? I’m thinking of doing the same sort of thing for Cerberus, to give us that bit more reach that we might not otherwise get.

Related; a few months after the campaign; how many of those people that expressed interest actually attended the event? How many of them are still active in the community?

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#2

You just need a Facebook page to create the ad. It’ll need a nice eye-catching photo, a very short piece of text that gets across exactly what you’re offering and to who, and a link to a place to book in.

Here are the things that I think made my ad for the “Introduction to Larp” session at the Auckland Larp Faire work:

  • We offered a complete guide for first-time larpers. This included a 1 hour session where 2 experienced larpers went through a presentation explaining larp and our local larp culture. It also included entrance to the Auckland Larp Faire where they could meet larpers and see nice stuff. And entrance to a 3 hour theatreform larp. .
  • We targeted people interested in tabletop larp. Specifically D&D and similar, and the larp we were offering was fantasy too so there was a genre match. Facebook finds lots of people with that interest. It’s my belief that there are a lot of tabletop RPGers around the world who would like to try larp if all the barriers to entry are removed. Meeting people before hand, learning how we do it, knowing that the event is welcoming to newcomers (even intended for them), all breaks down barriers. The Larp Census 2014 found that 75% of NZ larpers had also done tabletop. I believe that people who have done tabletop have the smallest adjustment to make when trying larps like we run in NZ, of all possible markets. D&D is the most popular tabletop game, and fantasy is the most popular larp genre (85% of Larp Census respondents had played a fantasy/mythology larp in the last year). So the biggest potential audience is fantasy tabletoppers who want to try fantasy larp, and that’ll give you the best return on an ad.
  • It was only $15. I also offered to help with costume
  • (EDIT) I forgot to say: once the ad is running, share it to the NZLARPS group and ask people to react, share, comment & tag people who might be interested. Having lots of responses to the ad pleases the algorithms, and improves the impression it will make on people who see it.
  • NOTE: the ad needs to link to an external site (like EventBrite) so that you can tell people where it is to respond/reply/share it. You can’t link people to it if it links to a FB event or page, for some reason.

We got thirty-something people who attended. I’ve heard that a number of the first-timers then went on to crew/play at campaigns. We didn’t track that metric, because I didn’t want to bother them with followup emails, but I hear it was quite a boost to some games.

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#3

Awesome thanks for that :slight_smile: In regards to the actual setting up of the ad, is it very difficult? Any pitfalls or shortcuts you can think of?

2 Likes
#4

This was important to a lot of them I think. Costuming your first larp, when you don’t know other larpers, is a big deal. Having someone who can either help you assemble a costume, or provide one for you, removes one of the barriers to participation.

#5

I can easily say that for me, the largest barrier to entry has and continues to be Costuming. Especially for Medieval / Fantasy games, the costumes, props etc are all very much not things people have around, or easily to hand.

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#6

Probably the wrong thread for this, but I’m always happy to help people make bits of costume! Especially for medieval/fantasy games.

2 Likes
#7

I forgot to say: once the ad is running, share it to the NZLARPS group and ask people to react, share, comment & tag people who might be interested. Having lots of responses to the ad pleases the algorithms, and improves the impression it will make on people who see it.

2 Likes
#8

OK will do that now, cheers (it’s been going a little over a day)