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The Perks and Annoyances of Facebook Event Invites

Where do I start? I’ll start with the basics of invites as they stand on Facebook. When I first joined Facebook, I wasn’t surprised that I would be invited to various events, because let’s face it, I have friends who want me to attend certain events. I like personal invites from friends that really would like me to attend their event and possibly even try to look out for me and say “HEY! Thanks for coming”. Likewise on my end. This is more of a friendship party point of view and I like being invited to dinner parties, BBQs, house parties etc. The benefit for friends is that they get to invite a mass amount of people without having to email, text or dare I say  “pick up the phone and call”. They get to see who’s attending, who isn’t and who’s on the rocks about the event. They get to account for how much alcohol, food, seating what have you. It’s a very fair system.

From a business standpoint, Facebook invites can be very useful. They are able to account from some of the same perks that private parties can. How many people are possibly attending without having to hand out flyers and do the old school method of guess. Promotors know, this method all too well, if you print 1000 flyers, at least 300-500 may show up. If you print 10,000 then 500-1000 people may show up. Oh, those days are numbered due to Facebook, Eventbrite, Twitvite and other invite services. In the long run, businesses also get to start to get a feel for their market and what to expect from online promotion.

Now to the annoyances of Facebook invites. I don’t know about everyone else, but the more friends you have the more events you get invited to. I used to be a promotor myself if any of you didn’t know that. I was doing it hardcore back in  03’-05’ with the R3 crew. We did the whole flyer guestimate, myspace, and word of mouth promotion. I think the only annoying thing about that was coming back to your car after being at a party and seeing flyers all over your windshield. Those days have to be over right? Now the most annoying thing is having to delete invites to events where you are invited by folks who are trying to get head counts. I get about 10-20 invites a day. That’s right, “a day”. I love my friends, I cheer for them, their events and promotion efforts, but y thing is that I don’t feel like deleting, event invites every five minutes. I also don’t want to block events coming from people because sometimes they do have something I would like to attend. Facebook, needs to come up with a way to bulk edit events, just as you can bulk edits your photo albums. If they had this option I wouldn’t  be so annoyed with having to delete events that I’m totally sure that I can’t attend.  On your part or in your efforts here are some solutions. Post an event on someone’s wall, or even in your own status update. This would help saving some from doing the whole “attending, not attending, maybe attending” time.

My final words on this topic: I think a lot of my friends may have the same feelings that I have towards the benefits and annoyances of Facebook invites. I did find “Events help” at the bottom of the events page. They have a suggestion form, which I think I may just write to today, that suggests some of my solutions to this issue.

BTW from the time I left my place this morning to the time I got to work (25min), I got 3 invites already. 25 minutes!