Do you use Facebook to market your events and let people know what’s new in your business? If not, you are missing a huge opportunity.
But you will want to be sure not to spam people with your event marketing! Sending out Event Notices to Facebook friends who have no interest in the subject is a sure way to reduce your friends…and maybe even get a few complaints.
Fortunately, Facebook has a wonderful system that allows you to indicate interests that your friends may have. It’s the Friend Lists (see previous post about how to set these up).
Use Friend Lists for Targeted, Efficient Event Marketing
Facebook allows you to invite your friends to events 100 people at a time. Typically, this means clicking on 100 names, and then creating the invitation. Then clicking on the next 100 names and inviting them. Then another 100 names, and so on.
If you have a few thousand friends, this can take hours!
Now, instead of clicking 100 individual names, just one click of a Friend List accomplishes the same thing. Then one more click on ‘Send Invitations’ and that whole group of friends is invited!
And Facebook goes one step further – if you have friends assigned to more than one group, they won’t send invitations to each friend more than once. They monitor that behind the scenes, and only bring up the names of friends who have not yet received an invitation.
To see this event invitation shortcut in action, here’s a video showing how we used this to get the word out about our Money on Demand teleseminar series.
In addition to being a way to connect with your friends and family, Facebook is a powerful tool to use in your business marketing. You can create your own group, join other groups in your niche, and you can invite your Facebook friends to events that you host.
When you first join Facebook, you won’t have any FB friends. To make a friend in Facebook, you and your friend must both agree that you want to be friends. This means you have to find people with whom you want to become friends, and invite them to be your friend. Or agree when someone invites you to be their friend.
A great way to find new friends is to join groups on Facebook that are in areas that interest you. People who use Facebook in their businesses join business-related groups.
Then they invite members of those groups to become their friends. But you don’t want to mix everyone together in one huge Facebook friend cluster!
You will want to set up Friend Lists in Facebook when you invite people to be your friend, as well as when you accept a friend request. These Friend Lists allow you to remember where you met each friend, and what you have in common with them.
You can have friend lists for your personal friends and family, as well as for your hobbies and for your business-related markets.
When I set up my business or hobby-related friend lists, I do so by indicating the Facebook group in which we both are members. Or I’ll identify a friend list with a common interest (like hiking or traveling). Then when I have an event I want to share with people, I can easily post it only to those people who are likely to want to receive the information.
You’ll want to limit each friend list to 100 people or fewer (you can have up to 100 friend lists in Facebook). If you have more than 100 friends in a group, simply create a new friend list with the same name #2 (such as Traveling 2), and add friends 101 to 199 to that list. This way you can invite people to events using your friend lists (see next post).
Here’s a short video on setting up Friend Lists in Facebook.
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