Facebook is an incredibly powerful tool and a great asset to any comedian’s career, but unfortunately too many comics have picked up a few bad habits when it comes to using the social network.
Here’s a few things you should stop doing on Facebook because they’re ineffective, counterproductive, and often times just plain annoying to your fans.
1. Stop Sending Event Invites To People That Don’t Live In Your City
Just because you have the ability to invite all of your fans to your show next weekend, doesn’t mean that you should. Like most people who are fans of comedians on Facebook, my inbox is flooded with event invites from comics who are performing thousands of miles away from me.
If you’re sending out an event invite, take a moment to figure out exactly who you want to send it to so you don’t bother people who don’t live in the area of the show and clearly aren’t going to attend. If you don’t, and you just continue to spam people with those invites, they are very likely to block you or even un-Like your page.
Sending out pointless invites actually carries a lot of risk (it will cost you fans) for no reward (somebody that lives thousands of miles away isn’t coming to your show no matter how many invites and reminders you send).
2. Stop Auto-Posting Your Tweets On Facebook
I’d recommend not auto-posting anything on any social network – it looks sloppy, lazy, and sends a message to your followers that you can’t be bothered to take an extra second or two to actually post the tweet or Facebook update manually.
But one thing you definitely don’t want to auto-post to your Facebook profile is your tweets. Twitter and Facebook are completely different mediums, each with their own rules, strengths, weaknesses, and language. Way too often I see comedians posting Facebook updates that include references to @profiles, hashtags, retweets, and other Twitter-specific details. These posts are great on Twitter, but on Facebook they’re just spam.
Again, doing this can actively hurt your Facebook presence because every time you post a meaningless update you increase the chances that your fans will ignore your future updates and you increase the chances they’ll stop following you. If you’re too busy to take a moment to post a Facebook update without auto-posting, then you probably shouldn’t be using Facebook in the first place.
3. Stop Begging People To Do Things For You
Here’s a big misconception that comedians have about Facebook – its purpose isn’t to give you a way to ask your fans to do you favors. It’s actually quite the opposite – people follow you because they believe you’re going to provide value for them and not the other way around.
It’s one thing to occasionally provide opportunities for your fans to help you out with something, but way too many comedians’ Facebook pages read like a stream of them begging for favors.
Vote for me in this contest, share my video with your friends, come see my show, get more people to Like my page, etc. People didn’t Like your page so they could become your employee, so stop begging them to do your work for you. Instead, figure out what you can do to help them and see how that works out for you.
4. Stop Hiring People To Update Your Facebook Profile For You
Even though I work with lots of comedians to help them develop a good strategy for using Facebook, one thing I’ll never do is actually run their profile and post updates for them (and you wouldn’t believe how many successful comedians have tried to hire me to do so for them).
If you’re a comedian and a professional content creator, why on Earth would you then outsource the creation of content (even 140-character at a time content) to somebody else? Isn’t that supposed to be your expertise?
Don’t turn your Facebook page over to your publicist, manager, or whatever social media guru offers to run it. Fans aren’t that dumb – they can tell when you’re the one posting and when you’re not.
5. Stop Repeatedly Suggesting I Like Your Page
It’s one thing to suggest to your personal friends that they Like your new fan page – that’s actually a good thing to do. But do it once. Or once every few months. Don’t do it once a day.
This is another thing too many comedians beat to death as they just continually suggest their friends Like their page which is again, basically another form of spam. If you’ve suggested that I Like your page and I haven’t taken you up on the offer then maybe instead of suggesting it again, you should take a moment to consider why I turned down your invitation.
It’s probably because I looked at your page and saw that you’re doing the top four things on this list and I decided I wanted no part of that…just like most people do.
