Submitted by Sangita Nayak on April 29, 2009 - 3:15pm.
What is an acceptable frequency re: events on Facebook? We have two events within a week and I'm trying to think that through. Also just want to point out that FB yields lots of yeses but few come through. Are others finding this to be true? It feels like a more of an "I am down" type of yes, that doesn't generate a lot for live events. Maybe better for strictly online events?
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one answer via twitter:
and a reply from Facebook
"Sooo....as an avid message sender via facebook, I would say that you should really think about a couple of things:
What is your goal? Is your goal moving people to an event or moving people to a website or other notification about an event?
Now...for example, one of my goal is to drive up traffice to my blog. The frequency of my messages is directly related to the frequency of my blog postings (or perhaps one message per two blog posts).
Quite literally I have almost doubled the amount of UNIQUE visitors to my blog in one month and I have just about doubled the number of page loads as well, meaning that folks are going beyond just the link that I send to explore other postings on the site.
Note, some of this traffic is due to Twitter, but, overwhelmingly, Facebook yields greater hits than Twitter.
I would say that I send out roughly 1-5 emails a week. I am conscious of it, and I try to keep it to no more than 3 emails in a single week.
I do lose people, but frankly the loss compared to the increase in traffic is negligible. I think that on the month, right now, I am literally down net one person...enough people join my distribution list to keep the membership steady.
Now that is just about getting the information out and people reading it.
Moving people from reading about your event takes some good old fashioned organizing. I have had some success with Facebook invitations and returns. But, in the end, it takes good old fashioned follow up phone calls or some other type of outreach besides email/facebook outreach to generate a higher in person turn out rate. A phone call plus an email/invite will get you the best turnout.
That's my two cents on the topic."
JwJ's local coalitions have
JwJ's local coalitions have used facebook events successfully for rallies and educational events. I've only used it for 1 event and I did notice the "I am down" phenomena with our national conference, which is really the only experience I've had with it. But we were basically just using the list to promote the event, and messaged those people to the "real" registration offsite.
As a fb user who is a member of many causes/groups/etc., personally too many fb messages from causes annoy me, and I don't usually read them. Somehow the little ticker in the fb inbox is much more intrusive than getting a regular email - you have to click on it to see that it's an email you don't want to read, and then you have to click again to delete it.
Event invites and cause announcements don't bug me as much because they just sit there in the corner.
For whatever reason, event promotion works better on me on facebook than email event promotion. Plus you have that added bonus on fb that people can really easily invite their friends and sometimes people will randomly see that oh - my friend is attending event x; maybe I should check that out. Two events in 1 week wouldn't make me unfriend you, but 2 events EVERY week might.
more from Facebook
I think Brandon's response really hits it on the head. First question is what are your goals? Clearly you have a predefined audience (the people you are friends with on facebook). I think it will take a level of experimentation to really figure it out. Using Brandon's example metrics are very helpful in doing this.
We currently send out facebook messages and events in relation to our other work (tied to campaign events, tied to online actions, etc.) We haven't been as good about measuring, this is more of a capacity issue. Until we have time to really dedicate to full tim online organizing we use the shotgun approach: collect the approximation of your audience and fire away.
even more from facebook
PS My secret is Stat Counter...it's free...you can embed it invisibly on your website, and it keeps a tremendous amount of numbers and comparative data for you.
yet more, from Facebook
I agree that it all depends on what you want out of it. I would be fine promoting two events at once - if they were aimed at different audiences.
I really don't want to be spammed, but I appreciate efforts to inform me about things I might care about.
thanks to all who responded on Facebook
I'd sent Sangita's message out to some organizers on Facebook, and shared their responses above. thanks, in particular order to Brandon Lacy Campos, Joseph Phelan, Amanda Hickman, and Charles Lenchner.
Thanks
These were really helpful and super fast, and it enforced my experience, so thanks! I may be smarter now :)
Thanks to all the wonderful comments!
Thank you everyone! Sangita, let us know how it goes for you and what you find works!