Hello. Thank you for finding time in your schedule to browse our site. You can go just about anywhere on the web without fear of government issued vehicles raiding your house, so we’re thankful you have chosen to spend your precious time here. The post you’re about to read is aimed at improving the social networking efforts of musicians on the rise, but in reality the tips provided can be applied to almost any individual or small business hoping to further their digital impact.
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If you work in the live music industry, you spend a lot of time inviting people to concerts. Hopefully you are inviting them with a variety of methods, Facebook events being one. Which is great as long as you do it properly.
I get invited to a TON of shows, that the glorious nature of being friends with so many bands and promoters, there is always something going on, there is always too much going on really. The byproduct is that you receive a lot of Facebook event invites, which is great, great FB events get you all the details and can be a perfect way to get show info HOWEVER there is one kind of invite that becomes REALLY tiresome:
Invites to shows that are nowhere near me.
Now, every once and a while someone may be genuinely confused, maybe they met me in Calgary and keep inviting me to Calgary shows, no biggie, I may reach out to let you know but we all get confused sometimes. The thing that will get under your fans skin is the generic shotgun blast invite everyone to everything. I am obviously not got to come to your shows in Toronto, Winnipeg, Regina, Boston, Portland, Vancouver and Calgary, so don’t invite me, this isn’t confusion it’s laziness.
It only makes your invites less effective.
When you keep seeing the same basic information over and over that doesn’t apply to you, pretty soon you brain stops really taking in that information. Our brains know that they can’t handle every little detail they see in a day, so it categorizes things in order of importance, when your event is continually irrelevant to your listeners, pretty soon…it goes into the wrong bin, it’s irrelevant.
But it’s hard work to invite everyone! It’s slow! I can’t possibly know where all 2700 of these people are from!
Yes, it is harder, but if it’s more effective. It is a bit slow, BUT Facebook has given you the tools to make it not so very painful AND to make sure you can find the right people AND it’s free! If you don’t know about Graph search yet, you are missing out. Here is how it works:
In the search bar you type: My friends who live in __________
Facebook will then display a list of all your friends who live in that city. Killer.
Now, open up a separate window.
You could use a tab, but having two windows side-by-side will make this go much faster. As you go down 
the list simply type the name of the person and invite. I takes time but it’s really not bad at all. And that’s just the beginning of how musicians can take advantage of graph search…but that’s for another post!
This post was written by Andrew Jones, editor of Checkered Owl. It originally ran on his blog, but we loved it so much we felt it deserved to shared once more on ours. If you like his work and want to read more of his writing, or if you want to be super cool and offer him full time industry employment, reach out and connect with him on Twitter.
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