Facebook Event Pages
5February 27, 2012 by The Fuzzy Red Robe
In addition to being a consultant and a content provider, I am also very often a client’s target audience.
What do I mean by this? 9 times out of 10, I fall into the demographic, geographic and psychographic parameters of the audience a client wants to interact with. It means that sometimes based on what I know as a consumer gives me a “gut reaction” to a portion of a client’s communication plan.
Because of this, I find myself very much on the fence about Facebook event pages. Why? Because I never look at my event invitations anymore. There are just too many of them. They are the junk mail of Facebook.
Years ago, I put my address on the junk mail opt out list and to this day I bring my mail in the door and stand by the recycle bin and throw all of the flyers, postcards and letters addressed to “current resident” right in without even giving them a glance. In other words, if you want my attention, you had better be a bill, a paycheck, a bank statement or a hand addressed letter. I’d also rather cut my tongue out than tell a client I thought there was a good ROI on a direct mail piece.
A month ago, I went through my email and unsubscribed to about 50 different mass email lists. I was sick and tired of opening my inbox in the morning to find 30+ emails with perhaps only two requiring my attention.
One marketing firm (who shall remain nameless) crammed my inbox with at least one and sometimes two mass emails every day. It makes me wonder if they are really paying attention to the desires of their audience. Otherwise, I don’t think they would be abusing this communication option. With this in mind, I “might” recommend to a client that they send out a mass email from time to time but only for very SPECIAL events.
Now I find myself having this same gut reaction to Facebook event pages. There are just too many and generally they aren’t targeted. I live in Georgia now and I get invited to at least a dozen events in Grand Rapids every week.
The only time I see an event page as effective is when the event is open and many people are involved in promoting it online. Then the event page serves as a place to link to for more information.
Even in the early days when event pages were a novelty and getting an invitation was special, the event page was never an accurate gauge of actual attendance or participation. It was essentially useless for planning purposes.
So I ask you my readers…Facebook event pages? Yes, No or Maybe. And more importantly, why are you for, against or indifferent?
Category Advertising, Marketing, Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy | Tags: Business, Facebook, Facebook features, IPhone, junk mail
I TOTALLY agree with the “spammy” nature of event pages – I get WAY TOO MANY. However, I know that I DO use the integration of event pages to my calendar; so that the events I AM going to are automatically added to my calendar and I have all the event info nicely packaged in my calendar. Which leads directly to the next reason I still like the events… the details! Integration of details and maps and then the string of comments is helpful to reference the day or two before the event.
I would also agree with your assertion that you cannot use the RSVP list as a true gauge of who will attend; I’d say it is a close approximation to cut that number in half and cut the “maybes” into a quarter (most people are just being nice) – and that is still just an IDEA, not a science.
For the most part, I get several invites every day, and I take a few minutes on one day every week or so to go through and delete myself from the events I’m not attending – yes, “delete myself”, I rarely decline an invitation because I don’t like the ‘rude’ feeling of declining without an accompanying RSVP, and I don’t have time or desire to RSVP negatively to all of them, so I just remove myself from the invite.
So, I say they are still worth the time to create, especially as Facebook becomes the one stop shop for all our social activities — it is still very frequent that I go to Facebook and search for an event to get time and place reminders before I go to Google to search for a website to give the same details.
There you have it … my ramblings. Ramblings which may or may not be a direct result of missing my friend who now lives in Georgia.
Excellent points Chris. What are your thoughts on multiple event pages? That’s the other thing that concerns me. Several people create a page for the same event and then the message gets fragmented. BTW, a little bird told me your friend in Georgia will be in GR the week of 3/19.
I never look at my event pages unless I’ve gotten a personal invitation via message from someone I know. My email inbox is out of control, and I’ve come to believe that when I unsubscribe, that assures them they’re reaching me and they just change the “from” address a million times. 95% of my daily email is junk and often I miss the important ones. On the fence about advising occasional mass emails, afraid they just get buried in the muck.
Mel, I’ve overlooked important emails in the avalanche of emails before too. However, my unsubscribing seems to have worked. I only have 5-6 emails in my inbox every morning as opposed the the 20-30 before I went on an “unsubscribe” spree.
I don’t get that many event invitations, to be honest. I don’t get much junk mail either, and most of what I do get goes straight into the junk folder. So events pages are OK wtih me. (I actually went into my Events folder to check I’m not missing piles of spam and nope, nothing new bar a birthday reminder, which is good. Also, I’ve just realized it’s Whedon Month in April. Wheee!)
Er, anyway, I sympathize if it’s become a spam-fest for others…