Piece By Piece Facebook Is Dying…& Promoters Are Killing It

Promoters are killing Facebook. Someone make them stop, please.

One of the greatest features about Facebook which I use above all else on the site is the Messaging/Chat app and feature. But promoters seem to want to kill it and drive it to irrelevancy as quickly as they did Events. Exhibit A is above. This really happened and I am still waiting for his response. (I don’t actually expect one.)

In February 2011, @unmarketing aka Scott Stratten wrote a blog post “How We Are Killing Facebook” which talked about how people are killing Facebook by creating what he called “event apathy.” Essentially, event apathy is caused by people using Facebook to invite others to events that are just completely not targeted towards them (be it due to them living thousands of miles away from the event, being not interested in the topic, or being outside the target demographic, among a host of other reasons). Because of this, as Scott mentions, many people have begun to ignore Facebook Event invites to the point that the function may not as well be on Facebook at all. I know I turned my event notifications off months ago because, quite frankly, they were getting too darn annoying and were draining my cell phone’s battery. I’ve had people miss events that I invited them to that I know they would have loved coming to because they simply didn’t see the invite. I know a number of people who have once again begun using services such as Evite or Paperless Post because they know we still check our emails but ignore Facebook events.

Who is to blame for this? Scott doesn’t really narrow it down in his post but I am going to because they are the worst offenders: Promoters.

Before I go on let me be clear I have nothing against promoters. Heck, I am currently partially responsible for running one group’s Twitter account: @ElevateUrNight where I am making it more awesome and less spammy than any other promoter’s Twitter feed I have ever seen. Go on, check it out, I’ll wait right here.

Now that you’re back from checking out the promoter group’s Twitter account I am helping to manage I will continue. I wrote about how promoters are killing one aspect of Facebook in my post a while back “Changes Facebook MUST MAKE To Photo Tag Options & Privacy Settings” and since then Facebook has changed the way tags work – thankfully. But the Events feature is still as good as dead as evidenced by this screenshot:

That is really in my Facebook Events inbox right now. I am invited to THE SAME EVENT 4 times and 3 times by different people. Each promoter obviously makes money if I go in on their list and if other people see that I am going or invited to the event so they send out as many invites as possible. (Facebook only makes matters worse by having “suggested events.”) It got to the point that people who were part of the same promotions group were inviting me each to their own version of the same event. Those people have since been set to be permanently ignored for all event invites.

You might ask why I don’t just unfriend all of them and the reason is because I am not just Facebook friends with them, I am actually friends with them in real life. The solution is so much simpler and I am puzzled as to why Facebook has yet to make this change since it will only benefit them.

Limit the amount of Events someone can create/invite people to unless they are (a) a brand/business page or (b) paying a premium for their account.

Limit the amount of Messages/Chats someone can send people in a given amount of time unless they are (a) a brand/business page or (b) paying a premium for their account.

Think about it. What person who isn’t running a business is making events on Facebook multiple times per week every week? The people who are making multiple events per week and inviting thousands (literally) of people to them are making money off of Facebook’s platform and ruining it for the rest of us so why doesn’t Facebook at the very least take a cut for themselves?

Also, the person who sent me that message currently has 3,710 Facebook friends. Assuming he decided to send that preformatted message to all of them he was sending A LOT of messages in a relatively short amount of time.  What normal person who wasn’t running a business would do that? No one.

Personally, I like the idea of forcing them to become a brand page more than forcing them to pay a premium because – as I said – I am still friends with them in real life so want to be on Facebook too. If they are forced to have a page and not just be a regular Facebook user then it becomes easier to be their friend while not getting constantly annoyed by them.

Or maybe we should all just switch back to MySpace.