I live in Louisiana and if I have a gig coming up I’m not going to call my New York friends and be like, “Hey guys, I have a gig next week in New Orleans! Wanna come?”
You know why I wouldn’t do that? Cause they would stare at the phone and wonder why I’m asking them to travel 1309 miles to come see my stupid gig. No one would do that!
“Yeah, let me just hop in the car and drive 19 hours to come see you play for an hour.”
But people do it on Facebook all the time because most people have no clue how to maximize their Facebook Event Invites and how to do it the right way.
Well, that’s going to change because here’s how it’s done…
Alright, here’s how you do it the right way without annoying all the people on your friends list.
First of all, we need to group everyone in their own geographical list. This means you’re going to create lists on your Facebook account and group all your friends by State (or Country). This way, if you have a gig in Arkansas you can create an Event and only invite the people that live in Arkansas. Get it?
This is also beneficial if you travel a lot and would like to communicate with certain people in the areas you’re traveling. “Hey guys, I’ll be in Seattle next week. Can anyone suggest a good place to buy some pudding?” Things like that.
It’s not as tedious as it sounds. Go through 20 friends a day and in no time you’ll have everything squared away.
Ok, so let me break down to you how this works.
1 – Once you sign in you should go to your “Home” page. If you’re not already there then just click on the “Home” link at the top of the page. Now, scroll down to your “Friends” located on the left-hand side of your timeline.
Once you scroll down to that click on “More.” Don’t click on “Friends,” click on the link to the right of that that reads, “More.”
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2 – Now you’re going to click on the “Create List” link.
This link will allow you to create a new group to lump your friends into.
Of course you can also make a list and put all your non-Friends in and later on you’ll be able to exclude them from seeing certain things. But for right now let’s just focus on creating a list for people that live in your own state, country, province, island district, etc.
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Part 3 – Name your group
Now you’re creating a new Facebook group. Go ahead and start with your own state. For me, I started with “Snergonia.” I named my list after my hometown and now I click in the “Members” area and type in “A” and add everyone that pops up that lives in my area that starts with “A.” Like “Ashley,” or “Andy,” or “Alf.”
The point is to start with your own home state and add everyone that lives near you to that group.
Once you’re done adding all the people that live around you in that area click on “Create” and your first group is created. And now you need to go through the rest of your friends list and group them all into the States they live in.
This can be tedious, I know. But once it’s done you’ll have a nice list of people grouped into areas that you can invite to gigs or whatever you want. If you have a friend that lives in Wyoming and you want to help promote their gig then you can create an Event and invite all your friends that live in Wyoming without having to invite all the friends that live in Bucksnort, TN.
But you’re probably saying, “well, how do I quickly find which friends live in which state.”
Easy.
1 – Click on the search area at the top of the page. Then before you type anyone’s name in click on “My Friends.”
Once you click on that it will show you a large list of all your friends as well as a set of filters that will allow you to filter out the people in whatever way you want, i.e. interests, gender, religious beliefs, political beliefs, etc.
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2 – Once you’ve got your friends pulled up then click on “hometown” or “current city” and type in the name of a State.
So if you type in “Mississippi” all the people that live in Mississppi will show up.
You can even do this per city. So you can invite all your New Orleans friends to a show or you can invite all your Bucksnort, TN friends to your show (if your gig is in Bucksnort, TN, that is).
When I go down this path I open up a second tab for Facebook where my lists are being created. That way I won’t have to keep jumping back and forth. I have one tab that has my filtered friends and I have one tab that has my list creation area.
Alright, so you did all that. Now it’s time to create your Event and invite only the people that live around your gig.
Go back to the “Home” page and click on Events. Then click on “Create Event.”
Once that window pops up and you enter in all the info for your event go down to the bottom left-hand corner of it and click on “invite friends.”
This area will bring you to where you can invite specific friends or a custom list of friends.
Here we go, now we can click on the name of the State that contains all the friends that live in that area.
You’re probably thinking that this would take a long time. Well, I want you to consider this: If you’re in a band you can either be one of those lazy band members that does as little as possible to make things happen, or you can be a proactive and productive person that does what they can to maximize their efforts in promoting their music.
Don’t be one of these lazy mopes that expects the world to find them. Nothing happens when you sit on your hands all day. Take the initiative and go the extra mile.
