Ian McGonnigal shared Five Powerful Ideas for Using Facebook for Events. His suggestions are excellent for those who plan events.

I like his suggestion on using Fan Pages to raise awareness about your event and to give attendees a place to connect with each other before, during and after the event. This strategy can work nicely for virtual events too, however, I recommend that you create a private Facebook group for attendees so they can post information that you don’t want the world to see (especially those who didn’t pay to access your virtual event).

Fan Pages are great because they’re indexed by search engines and you don’t have to login to Facebook to read the content. But what happens if an attendee needs the call-in details and another attendee shares it on your Facebook fan page (this happened to me, but with Twitter)? Now, anyone who didn’t pay for access to your virtual event has the connection details to get everything for free.

That’s where a Facebook group comes in. Because groups in Facebook are not indexed by search engines and can’t be found unless you login to Facebook, attendees can safely share info about your virtual event knowing that only other attendees will see.

To really make your Facebook group hidden, make sure you make this group private and choose the option for it NOT to show up in Facebook search results. That means that each person can only join your Facebook group by invitation only.