Event Launch Strategies

Groups, as the name implies, adds the community aspect to Facebook. While Facebook Pages may be considered somewhat static forms of promotion, ‘Groups’ are interactive. Facebook Groups offer community based collaboration around a specific topic. The interesting thing is that you are allowed to invite 100 friends from your address book at a time. It allows for easy streaming of updates through messages to group fans. Facebook will not allow you to mass message everyone in your friends list but they will allow you to send the same message to all of the fans in your group.

One thing’s for sure, the people managing Facebook are serious about keeping it as spam free as possible. If you try to send the same message to more than 20 friends (contacts), you get a warning message of getting banned because of possible spamming. Yes there are ways in which you can work around this: You can stream updates and content to group fans as often as you want. Groups are capped at 5000 fans per group. By the way, fans are individuals who want you to update them and send them information regularly; otherwise they have an option to leave your group.

When you join a group, you immediately get messages from the Group Administrators. You can reply to them to get the conversations started. I recently found out that Facebook has no restrictions on sending the same message to over 20 people if you are replying to them. However if I join 200 groups (which is the max limit of groups I can join on Facebook) I will inevitably be sent 200 marketing messages every week from the group administrators, which allows me the opportunity to respond with the same message an unlimited number of times. The rule of thumb is not to spam people but get multiple conversations started by joining niche groups. I sent reply messages to the administrators of 200 night club promotion groups who were all asking me to attend their nights. In my reply I asked if I could buy a ticket to their events online. Nine out of ten responded with a “NO” which spun the conversation in the direction of online ticketing solutions. Now, my Events Listed application happens to facilitate this solution but I only pointed this out to people who were interested in finding a solution.

We’ve built a Facebook Group for “Social Traffic” as a way to engage as many people as possible, all the while building a culture around the group. As an example, all group members believe in building fewer quality relationships rather than populating lists with random followers. All members also know that the best way to be heard is to listen.

Facebook has a policy that ensures that only real people have accounts. Naturally, it becomes a social etiquette not to offend your contacts in any way. The relationship dynamic of having ‘friends’’, effectively retains the sanctity of friendship in the Group’s inner circle as something with a high perceived value to members. I think all the press Facebook gets for shutting down accounts of people who have multiple identities or who cannot prove they are a real person behind the account as brilliant. It’s the same as how everyone wants to get into those nightclubs that have beautiful, successful and sophisticated people in it. Their door-policies protect your experience of visiting the night club. A successful professional doesn’t want to spend $100 on a night out in a club to be surrounded by road-workers. They want to know their effort and expense will ensure the experience is what they visualized before committing to it and that someone they trust is underwriting it.

As a user, the stringent policies of Facebook make me feel that my experience of using it (as opposed to other platforms, like MySpace) is going to be a better one. It’s funny how policies like these affect their growth rate. A few years ago, MySpace was leading this domain, whereas Facebook was just a little brother to it. Today, Facebook has grown tremendously and flown past MySpace and many other social networks. This is because they take extra measures to safeguard their user’s privacy and experience. The way that companies like Facebook and Google conduct their businesses draws light on the future of online business. They are my mentors and teachers. I study their strategies and policies every day to stay on the cutting edge. Watching how the “best” get to that level helps in predicting what is to come. I would encourage you to always be aware of everything that is happening around you in the online world.

Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)

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