Facebook Events Settings: Can You Make a Private Facebook Event Public?

• Once an event is created in Facebook, it's not possible to change the privacy settings.
• Request that all invitees invite as many people as possible to the event - each person can send up to 500 invites for a single event.
• Use the "duplicate event" feature on Facebook to create an identical event and update the privacy settings.

Invite more people (and have other invitees do the same). If you've already created a private Facebook event that a lot of people have interacted with, you can use the event's popularity to your advantage. Rather than create a brand-new public event from scratch, you can post within the current event, asking all attendees to invite their friends. Let them know you aren't able to change the privacy to "Public," and encourage them to spread the word. Each person can send up to 500 invitations for a single Facebook event—if you have enough people invite their own friends, you'll reach a wide audience. If you deactivated the option to allow guests to invite friends when you created the event, you can re-enable. Just edit the event and toggle the "Guests Can Invite Friends" switch to the On position. Although it's possible for you (and other guests) to share your private event on your news feed or in a group, people who haven't been invited will not be able to click or tap the link to find information about the event.

Create an identical event. Facebook used to have a quick "Duplicate event" option that allowed you to easily make a copy of an existing event. Sadly, that feature is no more—you'll need to create your new event from scratch. When creating your replacement event, remember to set it as Public, and add something to the title or description that calls attention to the fact that this new event will be replacing the old private event. You can keep the existing event if you'd like, but you can also delete it once enough people from the original event have RSVP'd on the new event. After creating the new event, send a message to all attendees letting them know why a new event was created. Be sure to share the new public event on your timeline, and encourage other attendees to do the same.