The Event Calendar in the NewsCloud Facebook application is quite powerful. Not only does it provide a way for you to publish events related to your community or topic, it allows for your audience to post events or add events from Facebook. We can also import events from Calendar provider Zvents.
Promoting and highlighting specific event listings can be a great way to drive interest and awareness of your Facebook application.
For example, with Internet guru Clay Shirky visiting Seattle this week, I created an event page at The Needle to promote his appearance: Clay Shirky at Town Hall Seattle. To add appeal to the listing, I included a photo of Shirky and a video of one of his talks from YouTube.
Then, I shared this event to my Facebook wall using the Share link. And, I tweeted it using the Tweet link (note, normally it's best to tweet to your site's account).
As a moderator on The Needle, I Featured the event and configured the home page to include the Featured Event widget at the top of the front page sidebar.
There are some additional features we'll be adding to make it easier to add events: making it easier to map and link locations, adding an external URL when you add events individually, allowing you to associate other links with the item as well as affiliate products such as books, DVDs and CDs. In the future, we may enable you to sell event tickets directly through the application.
