Facebook's new trick to woo businesses: Event ads to hit news feeds

Facebook has announced a new advertising model to help businesses more effectively promote event ads and reach wider audience.

Every month, 400 million people around the world use events on Facebook to discover and connect with everything from parties with friends to things happening in their communities. And nearly 30 percent of all the events people connect to - like concerts, community events and special nights at bars and restaurants - are created by Pages.

“To make it easier for businesses to reach even more people for their events, we’re announcing new features that help Pages promote their events and see how they’re performing,” Facebook said in its blog .

In the coming weeks, Pages will be able to create ads for desktop and mobile News Feed that boost awareness of events and drive responses. Previously, these types of ads were only shown in the right-hand column on desktop, the social networking site added.

Event ads on both mobile and desktop will display a ‘sponsored’ tag below the event name to differentiate it from unpaid events.

Page owners will be able to create event response ads in both the Ad Create tool and Power Editor.

The company will also launch an ’event insights’dashboard that event hosts can view in the right-hand column of an event page. These insights will show: the number of people who’ve seen a link to the event on Facebook; the number of people who’ve viewed the event; and the number of joins, saves and maybes the event has received.

“These insights represent the first step we’re taking to help Pages better understand what’s working and not working when promoting their events.”

In addition, for Pages that often host events, Facebook has come up with the Events tab. “It is a great way to share upcoming events in a single view. People that visit a Page on mobile can also scroll through the Upcoming Events section to see the events a Page is hosting that week.”

If you don’t see the tab on your Page, click the More menu and reorder your tabs so Events is one of the first to appear.

In addition, the company said it also improving the events experience for people on Facebook. Each person’s events page has a new look and feel to better highlight their upcoming events and showcase new events, including suggested events based on information such as the Pages they like, their location and the day of the week.