Using Facebook To Announce Your Church Events or FB Spamming Your ‘Friends’
ByI don’t like to rant on blogs, especially this one … but now I’m irritated enough to do one.
Here’s the deal … I have over 600 friends on Facebook. I love that I can connect with a bunch of people through it.
I try to be pretty selective with who I add to Facebook besides I use it as a ministry tool also to connect with our college kids. Typically, though, when a minister or someone connected to one of my “ministry friends” adds me as a friend, I usually add them automatically – thinking there’s some watered down discernment factor there.
But lately – in the last couple of months – I’ve been barraged (spammed) with “grand opening” or church announcement messages from some of those.
So much so that today, I actually removed one as a friend.
Hot tip for pastors and ministers using Facebook: Find a way to build momentum for your church without spamming me, or, uh, other ‘friends’ who live thousands of miles away from your church, quite content with their own home church, and get extremely irritated when they have to delete your notification and consequently remove you as their friend.
It’s spam. Don’t do it.
Instead, create an opt-in Facebook Page, Group or event … ask people to sign up for those, in which they know, understand and commit to getting your email updates.
Rant over.
It’s relatively easy to set parameters on your messages to those in you “network”. So, you can specify friends that live or have joined your network… (Example: Indianapolis Network)
I agree, as I also get many event invites for things in other states!
Amen and AMEN!
I recently created an opt-in group for my site that will be used to communicate things in the future. It’s such a pain to manually filter people each time I want to send a message or invite people to a party, having them in a group saves a lot of time and effort!
I really wish Facebook had a feature to allow saved groups of contacts, though. Sometimes there are different groups of people I want to invite to different events, but I don’t really want to have 4-5 groups for things like, “House Party,” “Party for wife’s friends,” etc.
Good word. I bet a lot of people don’t even realize they’re spamming people.
We use our ‘group’ and the Friends List (on the new Facebook) to create a specific distribution. With friends list you can create specific sets of friends for each purpose. Friends in network who live in a zip code, friends who are financial sponsors, friends who attended your church only once and you want to say hello to monthly, etc. And you can put people in multiple friends list.
To add, remove or edit your Friends List, go to the ‘Friends’ tab and look for the options on the left under ‘Friends List’.
Certain events we invite all members of our group, and then add people from our ‘Friends List’ that we know are interested in the event. So if I am doing a Film & Theology discussion, I invite the group and ‘Film Friends’ from my friends list.
Here is a thought… don’t sign up in the first place… a culture of blameshifting… Here is he disclaimer I put on our page/group in facebook because I got accused of spamming…
“Please be reminded that this Facebook group is for Oasis… a church plant in Goose Creek, SC. By subscribing (something YOU did), we are asking you to pray for us, keep informed, and support in any other way you can if you are led. When we make announcements about our events we realize that not everyone can attend (distance or other extenuating circumstances) and we are in no way asking you to make a loyalty decisions regarding church and ours. Personally, I just hope you are a part of a church. If you do not wish to receive invitations or updates about us, then please remove YOURSELF or send me a PRIVATE message and I can remove you. We do not want to cause anyone to stumble in their faith as I know you do not want me to stumble in mine… Please realize that we are humbled by your support of us (prayer, visiting, referrals, donations, etc) and do not take it lightly. Oasis…where relationships are mess worth making….”
has anyone tried buzz411.org?
Ironic. We just had a staff meeting this morning about this very thing.
It simply comes down to the difference between permission and obtrusive. If they’ve signed up to be a part of your group…then bring it on. If they aren’t…don’t send them a thing.
It’s respecting them, too. Because they know the difference and they expect us to as well.