Geo-Targeting Your Facebook Event Invites

While advertising your show through Facebook can certainly be effective, the platform doesn't always make it easy to do. In this piece Chris Robley of CD Baby walks us through how to geo-target your next out-of-town show to the right people.

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By Chris Robley of CD Baby from the DIY Musician blog

You book an out-of-town show.

You create a Facebook event to promote it from your Facebook music page.

You go to invite your personal friends and family that live near that town.

Then you remember, Facebook won’t let you sort your friends based on proximity to the venue. Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!

Are you gonna scroll through every single one of your bazillion Facebook friends and send manual invitations?

Hell no. Are you gonna invite everyone you’re friends with? Hell no (because they won’t be your friends for long). Here’s what you do.

A Facebook hack to target your event invites based on location

This workaround requires you to pretend that you live in the town where your gig is. Then you lie to Facebook for five minutes. Then you tell the truth again. In the interim you’ll be able to invite the Facebook friends most likely to go to your show. Here’s how:

1. Navigate to where you edit your “Current City” location on your personal Facebook profile.
2. Change the privacy settings on your “Current City” to “Only Me.” (I’m not sure if friends always get notified about location changes, but Facebook changes how they function every fifteen seconds, so this should prevent anyone from writing you saying “I didn’t know you were moving!”)
3. Change your current city to the town or city where you’ll be performing (don’t worry; you can just change it back afterwards).
4. Go to the event page on Facebook.
5. Click “Share.”
6. Select “Invite Friends.”
7. Select the town from the left-hand sidebar — and look at that; the right town is now listed!
8. Click “Select All” or manually invite the friends who’ve now been sorted by location.
9. Once you send the invites, switch your “Current City” back to where you actually live, or go ahead and move on to the next stop on your tour so you can do the same for all the Facebook events you’ve created.

That’s it. Kinda simple. Kinda a pain. But it gets the job done.

Do you know a better way to achieve the same results? Holler in the comments!

Chris Robley is the Editor of CD Baby's DIY Musician Blog. I write Beatlesque indie-pop songsthat've been praised by No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, & others. My poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, & more. I live in Maine and like peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, a little too much.