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Advertising or Publicizing Your Events Using MySpace and Facebook

Email is for Spam

I barely read my email anymore. I’m not sure if it’s because I need Ritalin or drink too much caffeine, but email is boring. We need email though. It is necessary: for opening up MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Second Life accounts. But that’s about all it’s good for. I can subscribe to feeds instead of signing up for newsletters, I can message loved ones on SNS sites, and I can find great deals using Google. Email is for working chumps and students check it if their school makes them or if they are nerdy. It has turned into TV without DVRs. So little information and so many commercials… Kind of like this blog.

How to Publicize Properly

SNSs have built in sweet features to plug your events to all of your “friends” and target geographic or interest groups of non-friends. I have a bunch of gold nuggets for reaching students using other sites, but SNSs are beautiful places to advertise for free. Sure, you could send out mass emails to your applicant or inquiry pool, but why not use something more effective. There are a couple of ways to do this in MySpace and Facebook, and I’ll only briefly touch on them here. I can save the in depth stuff for later when people may actually read this stuff.

Bulletins

Bulletins are used for quick updates for your friends when they first sign on to the SNS. Usually a user will ask for comments on their newly posted pictures, or notify friends of new content on their profile, or just complain about life to all of their friends. Bulletins are perfect places to direct users to websites, newly posted videos, notification of deadlines, or to let them know about a college fair in their area. You get bonus points if you bulletin your friends about updated content. It signifies that you’re a committed SNS user and not just on the site to advertise. If a counselor or recruiter takes a trip, post some pictures of the largest ball of wax or Art Linkletter’s Volkswagen and bulletin your students. You’ll get feedback, you’ll make them think of your institution, and you’ll build a relationship.

Posting Events (AKA Big Red Things)

Events are postable and invitable elements on SNSs. The invite function of the event is a great feature, because you’re able to send individual invites to all of your friends on an SNS but you’ll also have your event posted on the general events calendar (if specified). The event will pop up as an alert on your friend’s dashboard when they login to their site as a big red notice. I still get excited when I see big red things on my login page.

Maybe This Was My Point

So all that to say, it’s a good idea to solidify a SNS presence before branching out to other tech venues (podcasting, youtube). You could put the cart before the horse but you’ll make the horse mad and you’ll have to walk.

© 2007 Tim Cox.