You can help us use Facebook more effectively by reaching out to your Facebook contacts. People will be more likely to think about attending if they hear about it from you, rather than someone they don’t know. There may be people in your network who have never thought of joining Toastmasters but will consider it once they know you are active.
The two main ways you can help are by sending Facebook invitations and by sharing the event listing with a personal message. Sharing other items such as speech videos is can also be effective. When Joy Carter visited with us, she suggested we emphasize how a speaker in one of those videos has improved – helping others imagine that they could benefit from a similar improvement – because otherwise people may think, “oh, but I could never do that ….”
Sending Facebook invitations
You can find the event posts I have been creating through my profile page or through the Club Awesome Facebook group. Click through to the event listing and look for the Invite Friends button (top right, under the photo).
When you click that button, Facebook will give you a listing of all your connections on the service. You can search for specific individuals by typing in their names. Check off the ones you want to invite and click Send. Invitees will get a notification that you have invited them to an event. If there is someone whose attention you particularly want to get, you may also want to send them a personal message (I’ll come back to that later).
You can also narrow down the list to just your local contacts. Click on the drop-down list in the upper left hand corner of the invitation form, and you should see an option that says “Coral Springs, Florida area” or “[Your town here], Florida area.” That will narrow the list to your town and surrounding towns — it’s actually a fairly big area, but at least you won’t be sending invites to people who live in other states or other countries.
Again, check the checkboxes next to the names of the people you want to invite and click Send.
Another technique is to view an event we have posted for the club and click the Share button. This will make the event show up on your “Timeline” or “news feed,” just like any other message, link, or photo you might post.
To make your sharing more effective, add a personal note about why you find Toastmasters valuable, emphasizing opportunities for personal and professional growth, and being sure to say guests are always welcome to attend for free. Say whatever you want, but say something.
Click Share Event to post the link to our event, along with your message.
Again, if you have a lot of Facebook contacts who are not local, you may want to narrow the distribution of your message. Depending on your Facebook settings, the default may be “Public” or “Friends” but we can click on the drop-down list to customize it.
Scroll down to See All Lists and click there.
You should then see “Coral Springs, Florida area” (or the equivalent for your town) as one of the options. After making your choice, click Share Event.
Another option is to share the event in a private message to one or more friends, allowing you to add more details about why they should attend.
The default is to share “On your own timeline” but if you click on the drop-down list at the top of the sharing form, you will get some other options. Click In a private message.
You now get a “To” line at the top of the form, sort of like with email. Type in the names of the people you want to send the event listing to and pick matches from the list.
Add a personal message and click Share Event.
Let’s try this over the next few weeks and see if we can bring in a few additional people from our combined Facebook networks.
Thanks for your help!