Facebook Marketing in a Digital World - Behind the event with Kat Smith

On Friday 1 October there was a marketing event delivered by Facebook for University of Birmingham students. Kat Smith from the B-Enterprising team helped facilitate the event and shared her reaction to the event as it happened.

10.37am

It’s always exciting to be involved in a B-Enterprising event and we’re proud to have worked with some big names.  Today the atmosphere in The Exchange is electric as we prepare to work another iconic brand in Facebook. 

This afternoon, experts at Facebook will be holding an interactive online session with students from the University of Birmingham and entrepreneurs from our incubator at The Exchange.  They will learn how to use insights into consumer behaviour to create effective adverts, and how to tailor adverts using consumer behaviour data.

Participants will have the opportunity to create their own advert and get feedback from the Facebook pros.  Imagine how fantastic that will sound at a job interview:

               ‘Do you have any digital marketing experience?’

               ‘Well, yes, actually I learnt about digital marketing from the Facebook team.’

Over 250 people have signed up to join the session, making it one of our most popular events to date. 

12.08pm

The last-minute reminder email has just been sent and we are nervous and excited.  What if nobody comes?  What if we have tech issues?  The pressure’s on to make a good first impression because we want to work with Facebook as much as possible in future.

Unfortunately Facebook policies don’t allow us to record the Zoom session and some people have told us they have lectures this afternoon.  The reminder email was a good opportunity to encourage people to attend for any part of the session that they can manage, rather than miss out.

3.38pm

The Facebook event is live and running smoothly – we’ve already learned that it takes our brains only 0.4 seconds to recognise an image! We’re thinking about how websites use pixels to track consumer trends and the importance of optimising images and webpages for mobile devices.  It’s great to see such an interactive session: the chat is on fire!

4.16pm

Taking a quick breather while the breakout room work is underway.  The Facebook facilitators have clearly put a lot of effort into preparing today’s session and are now dashing between the breakout rooms to support the group work – very impressive.  Meanwhile the breakout groups are hard at work creating their digital content so that the Facebook team can give some feedback.  The biggest challenge has been meeting the different technical demands for PCs/laptops vs mobile devices.

4.40pm

Phew!  From the activity in the chat we can see that this has been a lively and useful event.  It feels wonderful to have helped make this event happen to bring people together and get them thinking in new ways. 

By Kat Smith
Knowledge Exchange Operations Officer, B-Enterprising Team