Sending Facebook event invitations, RSVPs is time well spent

If you’re creating events on your Facebook page for speaking engagements, book signings, teleseminars or anything else you want to promote, don’t miss an important step—emailing the invitation to a select group of your friends, or all of them, using the email function on Facebook.

If you have thousands of friends, that’s a time-consuming chore. But it’s worth it. Here’s an example that shows how those invitations made my cash register ring the last few days (and it’s still ringing).

On Wednesday, I created an event at Facebook called “How to Promote on Twitter” because I wanted my friends to know about the teleseminar series I’m hosting on Oct. 13 and 14 on How to Use Twitter to Amass an Army of Followers, Customers & Valuable Contacts–and Promote. I have more than 1,500 Facebook friends, and it took Chris Buffaloe, my assistant, more than an hour to email them all and invite them to the event.  Facebook lets you invite only 100 people at a time, which can be tedious.

When one of my Facebook friends, Adam Urbanski, the Marketing Mentor, got the invitation, he RSVP’d:

 I haven’t seen Adam in several years so I went to his Facebook profile page and noticed he’s a pretty popular guy because he has more than 3,500 friends. And there on his wall was a one-liner, letting all his friends know he had written my wall for the Twitter teleseminar event. The link to “How to Use Twitter to Promote,” by the way, is a hyperlink. His friends can click on it, read my invitation and, if they wish, register.

As soon as Chris emailed my invitation, I received more than a dozen registrations for the teleseminar @ $77 each. That’s about $924 in revenue, just from sending one invitation.  Granted, the topic is hot right now, and lots of Twitterers want to know how to use the site to promote instead of posting lame tweets about what they had for lunch.  But emailing invitations and receiving RSVPs results in hundreds more eyes reading your invitation and even more mutual friends seeing the topic.

Boost attendance for your events

If you’re sending Facebook invitations for your events and seeing no results, these could be the reasons:

• The title of the event is boring.
• The copy on the sales page for your event doesn’t promise value.
• You don’t RSVP to your friends’ event invitations, and the only time your friends hear from you is when you have something to promote.
• You don’t have enough friends yet on Facebook who are willing to RVSP to your events, so that the one-liner like the one above, underlined in red, shows up on their walls. 
• You aren’t taking the time to reply to the messages they send you on Facebook. I made the mistake of letting several hundred email messages accumulate in my Facebook inbox before I went through them one by one and replied. Two of them were invitations to be a guest expert on other people’s teleseminars.

During the teleseminar I hosted earlier this summer on How to Use Facebook to Promote Your Business or Nonprofit, Jason Alba, my guest expert, discussed the importance of RSVPing to events and writing on your friends’ walls. The timeline he explained to us on how to promote almost any event will really make your cash register ring!