Dive Brief:
- Facebook has launched “featured events,” a new way for its users to receive recommendations for events in a number of cities. The new lists will be curated by teams at Facebook rather than driven by an algorithm.
- Events will be selected for factors such as location and capacity by team members who already review events such as art, entertainment, food and drink, and learning in each city. The company says whether or not a company buys Facebook ads will have no impact on being selected as a featured event.
- There is no mechanism for events to be submitted for consideration and only public events hosted by a Page will become featured events. Private events will not be included in the featured event listings.
Dive Insight:
With the new featured events recommendations, Facebook wants to give users a list of things they could do in their free time.
“You can think about it like a weekend or weekly digest of cool stuff that you can do in your city,” Facebook Events product manager Aditya Koolwal told TechCrunch.
The feature will launch by rolling out to 10 cities: Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.
Having the featured event listings curated by people rather than an algorithm is a new development at Facebook. Previously, all recommendations were automated based on data collected about users and their friends.
Even though there isn’t much marketers can do to make it more likely for an event to make the featured events list, marketers should ensure any public event has its own dedicated page on the social media platform because only events that have a Facebook Page will be considered.
Users will still also receive event recommendations based on its algorithm, according to Facebook.
“Featured event lists are one of the ways people discover events on Facebook. In addition to featured events, we provide personalized, automated event suggestions throughout Facebook, including the dedicated events space" the company wrote in its blog post. "These event suggestions are algorithmically generated based on your preferences and activity, such as events you've connected to in the past, events popular with your friends and community, or events hosted by Pages you like.”