A new blog series exploring the common mistakes people make with Facebook events, and how to avoid them.
So we’ve discussed the fold and how to share effectively. Next up we discuss the cardinal sin of invitation overload.
INVITE ALL THE PEOPLE!
Go on, own up; I bet one time or another you’ve created an event on Facebook and then proceeded to invite EVERY SINGLE ONE of your friends using some sneaky JavaScript. Or perhaps you simply manually selected them all. Either way, it’s not big and it’s far from clever!
If you want to avoid pissing off your friends, or worse, having them completely ignore your invitations altogether, then you need to be more selective with who you invite. Instead of spamming everyone, you should see yourself as a curator of events, carefully tailoring invites to those who will actually be interested. Your aim is to maximise the level of engagement with your events, and the best way to do this is to target those who are most likely to respond. This may sound like a lot of work, but thankfully there are a few things you can do to make this a piece of cake.
4 Facebook Event Invite Tips
Tip 1. Invite friends by Location, List or Group
By default, the “Invite friends” box lists all your friends, but you can easily filter your friends down by location, friend lists and the groups you belong to. This makes it much easier to target those friends that are most likely to respond to your invitations and means you can skip those friends that are in another city or country.
Tip 2. Organise Your Friends into Custom Lists
You can make selective-inviting even easier by pre-organising your friends into custom lists based on the interests that most align with your events. Just visit your friends page, hover over any friend’s name and you’ll be able to manage their list membership, creating new lists as required. A set of well-thought-out lists will enable you to target specific sets of friends with laser-like precision. You can speed up the process of creating these lists by filtering your friends using the search field at the top of the page.
3. Invite Sparingly, But Do Invite
As important as it is not to spam people with your invites, it’s equally important that you do actually make an effort to invite some people, as event invitations are still one of the best ways to increase your event’s exposure and reach. They also give you a direct line into invitees’ notification stream, as we’ll discuss in a future post.
4. Get Others to Do the Same
As well as inviting your own friends to your events, you should also encourage others involved to do the same, increasing your event’s reach even further.
So there you have it, a few simple tips to help you get the most out of Facebook event invites whilst avoiding being an invite spammer.
Bonus Tip: The Personal Touch
In some cases it makes sense to reach out to particular friends with a direct personal message containing a link to your event rather than an invite. Try and avoid sending these messages to large groups of people however, especially if they do not all know each other. Otherwise you’re just doing another form of spamming, and the inevitable replies will add further message spam to those unfortunate recipients.
Next Week’s Sin: Going Quiet
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