Facebook Events and Notes

Facebook has a free Event feature that enables you to promote online and offline events to your friends and followers. Not only can you list the event, but you can use Facebook messaging to notify your friends and others who sign up to attend about interesting event features or other information. Since young people think email is for old people, this may be the best way to notify younger supporters about your events.

Many Facebook members don’t know about notes. There’s a note that appears on the left column of your main page, and then there is a Notes tab in your Profile view. Writing a note is very much like writing a short blog post, with the exception that you can tag your friends. When you do that, the first part of your note shows up in your friends’ News Feeds. In addition, tagged friends are more likely to view your page and profile. Thus, writing a Note is a great way to stay in front of your community. Establish a regular schedule of posting notes to let everybody know what your business is up to.

Periodically a question posed through Notes goes viral, like the 25 Random Things About Me[1] question that garnered more than 5 million lists in a single week not long after it debuted in early 2009.[2] A current search via Google shows 235,000 current 25 Random Things lists on Facebook.[3] Even organizations such as the National Museum of Natural History got into the act.[4]

The craze inspired an offline game that actually sounds lamer than the original idea: “During Game play, you’ll try to match fun facts on the game cards with your opponents. Make a match and then add a new, totally random thing about yourself to your list. The first person to complete a list of 25 random things about them wins. It’s great fun to compare lists at the end of the game.”[5] We’ll just bet.

On Facebook your aim is to create a Note that fires the imagination of your community. To help it go viral, be sure to encourage or even require participants to tag their friends.