Over the last few days, I’ve received 73 Facebook event invitations. It’s not because of my incredible popularity, subtle wit, or boyish charm that people want me at their event. Shocking, I know. Instead, they overutilize the tool so much that it becomes noise — and therefore irrelevant.
As a marketer and promoter, you want to hedge your bets in the best possible way. Facebook invites let you (theoretically) know who’s coming, who declined, and who’s on the fence. When the time comes, you’re (again theoretically) accurately prepared. So instead of people inviting me based upon my aforementioned virtues, they’re just using an “invite all” type option without any regard for, well, much of anything.
Maybe I’d reply to one or two of these, but in a deluge of 73 over 72 hours, I’m just ignoring them in favor of dealing with actual important things. If the people making the invites (a couple of them are actual promoters!) understood that “come see my band” isn’t all that much of an incentive stacked up against the other 72 virtually identical invites, perhaps we’d be on to something.
Moral of the story: Don’t exploit a platform before you really learn how to use it.
