Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Leveraging Facebook with Groups

We all have events in our lies we'd like to invite friends to attend -- anytning from public programs to club meetings to the kids' soccer games. Facebook groups offer a way to make our friends aware of these events easily and noninvasively. Here's how to do so with an existing Facebook group:

First, an administrator should post the meeting as an event on the group's wall. Describe the event in a way that would be of value to members and outsiders alike. From there, you can send the noticeof the meeting out to all members of the group. This may seem almost redundant since it isn't much different from sending an email to those same people. hink of it as a necessary predecessor to the next step.

With the invitation posted, members can like, coment, or share it. Any of these gets a similar note onto the wall of all rheir friends. This is the payback for posting the event. Even if a group has only a dozen members, an average person on facebook has 120 friends. This has the potential to increase the visibility of the event by an order of magnitude if even one perosn does so -- two orders of magnigude if everyone does.

Of course there will be overlap, and of course most of the people reached will be too far away or not interested in the event. Eve so, the message gets out with almost no effort. Maybe more people will ttend the event. Maybe some will join the Facebook group. Mabe someone will talk to someone else. In the worse case, it makes your interest a bit moevisible to people who have an interest in you. Most organizations would take any one of these as long as itis free, which it is.

Try promoting your events this way and see what happens. It's just common sense.

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