With Facebook events, you’ll no longer have to worry about sending out invitations or calling up all of your friends to be able to get together. A Facebook event allows you to create an event page for your next party, invite your friends, and allow invitees to easily RSVP.
How to join a Facebook Event
Unless it’s public, you’ll need to be invited to a Facebook event in order to join it. If you receive an invite, it will show up in your General Notifications. It will also appear near the top of the left-hand menu, under Events. Click this button to see the entire list of upcoming events you’re invited to. It will also show a list of events coming up this week and which of your friends (if any) are attending.
You can select Join right from the event listings page, or you can click on the event to read more about it before joining. If you don’t want to join, you can select Decline. If you’re unsure if you can attend, select Maybe. If you’ve selected Join and can no longer attend, you can change it from Going to Maybe or Not Going. If you don’t want any notifications from an event and want to remove it from your list of events, move your mouse cursor over it and click the “X” in the top-right corner.
On a public event, you can invite more people to the event by selecting Invite and then clicking either Choose Friends or Share Event (right onto your News Feed).
How to create a Facebook Event
If you have an upcoming BBQ or housewarming that you’re trying to put together, you can easily create your own Facebook event. Starting at the Event listing page, select Create in the top right hand corner.
Enter a name, description, location, date, and time for your event, and then select how visible you want your event to be:
- Public – Anyone can see this event, even if they’re not on Facebook.
- Open Event – Friends of anyone going to this event can see this event, as can anyone invited to this event by a guest.
- Guests and Friends – Only people invited by a host or a guest can see this event.
- Invite Only – Only people invited by the host can see this event.
In the bottom left corner of the window, select Invite Friends to invite people to your event. Scroll through their profile pictures and check off the box next to their name, or click in the top search bar, type the person’s name (Facebook will help narrow it down), and then click their name. Repeat either of these processes as necessary, then click Save when you have selected all of the people you want to invite.
When you’ve finished, click Create.
Once your event is created, you’ll still be able to invite more friends by typing their names into the “Invite Friends” search bar on the right-hand menu.
A Facebook event page is set up just like your profile page is. The captions below the screenshot will explain what the functions labeled by each number does.
1. Add Event Photo – Select this to add an event photo. Choose from Event Photos, My Photos, or Upload Photo. Navigate through the explorer window that appears, click the photo you want to use, and then click Open.
2. Guests – See how many people have been invited and whom has RSVP’d as “going,” “maybe going,” or “not going.”
3. Invite Friends – Click here, type in a friend’s name, and then click on them to invite them to the event.
4. Publisher – Write a status update for the event, add a photo/video, or ask a question about the event that others can vote on. It works pretty much the same way that it does in your Timeline.
5. Edit – Selecting edit will take you back to the pop up you saw when you first created the event. Here you can change the event’s date, time, name, details, location and privacy settings (Public, Open Invite, Guests and Friends, or Invite Only).
6. More – Here you can copy the event (creates the same event twice), export it to your email or contact guests. The last two options are useful if your friends prefer using other forms of communication over Facebook, but you still want to use Facebook to make planning the event easy.
And that’s how to join an event — or create an event and invite people to it — on Facebook!
