Interactive Facebook Parties that Work
SLIDE: Why Facebook Parties
Home parties are the foundation for how direct sales works so this is not a substitution for the real face-to-face thing. However, it will give you an extra source of possible income, it can leverage you over some other direct sales companies possibly and it can also give you the opportunity to get in front of people that you would not otherwise be able to if they can’t attend a home party. So we can get really creative as far as how we can present a Facebook party. It can go along with a home party it can be by itself, there are two or three different types of Facebook parties but we certainly have the ability to expand our business by using Facebook and social media that will not replace what is the standard in direct sales and that is our home parties. So I want to make sure that you all understand that right from the get go.
SLIDE: Types of Parties
There are quite a few ways to do online parties. Three of them that I have had success with or that I have tried are the 30 Minute Speed Party, the 60 Minute Home Party and a Two Week Open House Party. Now the two week open house party is probably something that you have already experienced if you have done any Facebook parties. It is where you open up an event and for two weeks this is live on your Facebook and people can come in and out of it as they wish, you post some things in there and hope for the best.
Today what we are going to talk about is the 60 Minute Party. The 60 Minute Party has been the best type of party that I have done. Again, this is from my own experience. This is where you create a Facebook event, you invite people to the event, post a link to your Scentsy, Grace Adele, Velata party online (the one that you make in your PWS) and you kind of allow them two weeks to order but you would have the ability to have a one hour fun-paced, fast-paced event just like you would with a home party. So if you have a home party open for a week you could do the same thing for your Facebook party. The actual event takes 60 minutes okay and that is what we are going to train on and discuss today. My favorite party is definitely the 60 Minute Party. I think it is because it is extremely fast paced. It will take practice for you to learn how to do it and I am going to give you some tips on the best way to have a successful party.
SLIDE: Create Party
Okay if you have a pen and paper now is the best time to take notes. If I know all of you guys on this training call you have your pen and paper ready. So the first thing that I want to express to you is you need to make this Facebook party as close to a home party as you physically can. When you do a home party you do Hostess Coaching, you do invitations, you do phone calls and you do preorders. You are going to do all of these things with a 60 Minute Party. I am going to use the 60 Minute Party as an example but it will pertain to basically any type of party that you do on Facebook.
The first thing that you are actually going to do is you are going to create the event in Facebook. Now I am not going to go through all of that today. Creating a Facebook Event is actually pretty easy and you will notice later and I am not sure I will have to ask the girls if they have uploaded the outlines to the training center if not we will make sure that it is there for you.
SARA: It is there.
Okay good thank you. When you create the event you must set it to ‘invite only’ now that is a policy from Scentsy Family and that is to keep it private and to keep it as close to a home party as we possibly can.
When you do a home party people come through the door, you invite them in and the door closes behind them what is happening in the home is the party and that is the effect that we want to try to do on Facebook. Now one thing that you need to remember is Facebook is never private. So we are doing as much as we can to keep it a private event, to keep it invite only and it also gives the feeling to the guests that they were personally invited. So we are going to talk a little bit about that as well.
The step-by-step document that I am talking about is there is an outline that is uploaded to the training center now so you don’t need to email me and I don’t need to use Dropbox. It is on the training center, it is a step-by-step outline all you need to do is copy and paste it into your Facebook event. Now what that will do now please remember save the document onto your desktop and change the information that is in it. The document created was created by me. It has my links in it, it has my information, my videos you want to change that to personalize it for yourself. So please don’t forget to do that. I have actually had people call me because someone was trying to order through my website and luckily we caught it in time so let’s not do that okay? Although I would love to have all your orders that is not the purpose at all.
SLIDE: Invite Only
This slide is showing you how to actually create the Facebook Event as an invite only. So part of the set up when you are creating the new event you will see where it actually says “privacy” click the drop down and select invite only. In the outline it actually gives you the information to put in those other fields.
SLIDE: Create New Event
The next slide shows us exactly what could be. You can customize this you guys I only put the outline together so you had something to go by if you didn’t have time or you didn’t want to create it. It is certainly something that you can use. I didn’t create it I tweaked it and it has been amazing since so we have had a lot of success with it. Copy and paste and put the details in there, put the name of the event, so-and-so’s Facebook party whatever you want to call it. Where it says “where” I always want to say “right here online.” Make sure that they understand that the party is actually here online and not in their home. So you put your dates, invite only and make sure the information is filled.
SLIDE: Get Your Scentsy On!
Now here is a screen shot of the event once it is created. Notice the popping picture, I love that word “popping picture.” These things may seem like little things but they are important to add excitement, pizazz and visual incitement to your party. As much effort that you would put into a table set up at a home party or an event you need to do the same things in your Facebook event. So if they come to your Facebook event and there is no picture up there and it is bland and non-inviting and it is not going to help your purpose. So make sure that you put some sort of a nice, bright popping picture up there to entice them to come into your online party. Visual impact is huge.
SLIDE: Invite Guests
This is probably the part that I need to stress the most. It seems to be the downfall of most Hostesses not even as much the Consultant but the Hostess. A group invitation is an info blast it is not an invitation. You want to make sure the personal message looks like it is for them and not just something that you have cut and pasted for everyone. So when you are coaching your Hostess to invite their friends tell them “please don’t invite everybody on your friend list. If you do that is fine but personally message them. Send each of them a postcard, send them a text, phone them if you need to, face-to-face invite them” but again we need to make this as close to a home party as possible because that is where the success is going to come in. If you just send out a massive blast email to everybody or just automatically invite them to that event because it is easy to do that when you are creating an event all you are doing is you are putting another event in someone’s news feed that they will ignore and they will not respond. That has been kind of what has been happening. We get so many invites for events on Facebook we ignore them. So you need to make it as personal as possible.
Facebook parties should not be different than a home party. You need to make sure that you are coaching your Hostess so that he or she knows that it needs to be a personal invite. I really want to stress that and I want to make sure because that is going to be a big part of the success of your event.
SLIDE: Create Excitement
Okay now once you have created that event on Facebook you are going to maybe put some pictures of products that are on special, some interesting information. Again that outline has some information on there. There is also a timeline which is kind of neat because on the timeline it will say “okay one week before your Facebook party starts, post this.” “Three days before your Facebook party starts post this.” It actually gives you a clue of the type of picture that you should put. Again, I have not see this and I am not 100% sure if the pictures are loaded there if they are not they are so readily available that you can find pictures on Google. If you need the Dropbox information I am sure that I can provide that information as well. You want to make sure that people know how to order. So that is one of the biggest things is that in the details area of your Facebook event you want to put the link to your Hostess’ party. The easiest way to do that is once you have created and you said “show on PWS” when you created the party on your website then you go to your website, click on that person’s party in your dropdown and then copy the URL that is in the address field up above. If you just copy it you can paste it right into your Facebook events.
So this is where it is going to be a good time to follow the outline if you want to and just know that it is all lined up for you and it tells you when you should post it. The week before a party starts is when those postings are going to start. You don’t necessarily want to go out further than two weeks prior because you are going to lose people’s interest or they will forget about it. So one week prior is perfect to start posting. It will be one week then about three or four days and then the day of the party you are going to start really posting some stuff in there.
SLIDE: Let’s Par-tay!!
Actually I think at that point I had the ability to show the outline but I don’t know if we are going to be able to do that today so you guys will have to go look for it but where you see “add a photo” “write a post” I am assuming that you all know how to put a post on Facebook and where it is highlighted that is basically where you are going to copy and paste. If you look above that where you see the website address ediann.scentsy.us that is actually the party link. So if you can get a party ID number then you know that you are linking into someone’s specific party. So that is a good tell tale.
SLIDE: Successful Party Tips
This is some of the best tips that I can give and the ones that have worked the best for me. The next few slides are going to be primarily about tips to make it work well for you. It is going to be really easy for you to use the outline and some of these other things are going to either make or break your party. So remember you need to remind everyone 24 hours before the party starts and if they can’t make it for the specified time they can put in outside orders just like you would for a home party. Here is a great time to give the Hostess an incentive for getting preorders. You could do the Tic-Tac-Toe Game which is on our workstation there are a ton of different games. It is kind of the same thing as our basket parties. So you give them an incentive to get a bunch of preorders prior to the party.
Maybe have an on time drawing. Anyone who has accepted the invitation to the event and is online at the start is in the drawing. That will help you have an audience at least at the start and make sure everyone knows that they have to accept the invitation and they have to RSVP to get into the draw and be online. At the start a roll call will be had (you will see that in the outline) and you get them something to type in. Now I have to put a disclosure. Any kind of drawing, any type of contest, any type of raffle or anything like that has to be done through private messaging okay? As I wrote on here remember that all specials or drawings have to be discussed and done through private message. Now that does not mean that if somebody wins something and you tell them through a private message that they don’t come out onto the Facebook page and celebrate the fact that they got something but there was never anything to make them do that. The only way that they knew that they could be in that drawing is because you private messaged them.
There is an ability to message all the guests which is amazing. So you can use that, you can also have the Hostess message if you are not friends with the guests which is probably going to be the case. So you want to get the Hostess involved in the party. Hopefully that makes sense. It is a policy that we cannot do any personal specials, we can’t do drawings unless it is face-to-face or through private message. We can do them if we do them right.
So when the party starts be chatty. Be chatty on there “welcome everyone who is here” encourage them to ask questions and interact. Have some questions or interesting facts all ready to go. If you want to talk about some of the things that have happened in Scentsy like maybe they are in the top 100 and they made number 25 so there are different things that you can pull out from our resources and post that interesting information and who knows maybe some of that might click with somebody and they may end up wanting to join.
So have some stuff going on, make it interactive, and get some questions going. You could type an award document prior to the party so that you could just copy and paste them once the party is underway. You might want to ask a couple of friends to attend so they can interact because people can sometimes be shy. So if you have someone in there who is willing to interact with you they may just jump on board. So that is a good tip.