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.
What else do you think comedians need to stop doing on Facebook? Share your thoughts in the comments…
My suggestion is, don’t get on Facebook ad argue politics with your idiot friends. Everyone else can see that and you are just alienating your potential audience who might have come to see you before they formed an opinion of you based on your political outrage. It doesn’t matter how right you think you are.
Because “every” and “time” are two seperate words and therefore – like “a lot” – should not be conjoined.
But the hashtags thing has become more of a joke on facebook than an annoyance, so I thing re-posting is probably not THAT bad. The Event invites part is the most annoying thing to me, as a fan AND a comic.
Whoops, wrong post…
Ok so I do the TOP two things on this list of things “not to do”…lol…I can definitely see your point, I will select more carefully next time….but the tweet to Facebook sounds a little petty. The reason that is done a lot is probably more for the friends/fans you DON’T have on Twitter but DO have on Facebook and vice versa. That way your “message” gets out to everyone instead of logging out and back in somewhere just to type the same message. The only thing more annoying than SEEING the redundant messages TWICE in a row is DOING the redundant action TWICE in a row….everytime….off the subject, why is Google telling me “everytime” is spelled incorrectly? whatever, Nice article Josh, Thank yo as always!!!!
Use the “Selective Tweets” app, so you don’t have to include @replies, retweets, and such. People don’t want to see those outside of Twitter since out of context they usually don’t make sense and end up just cluttering a fan’s feed without providing anything relevant. With Selective Tweets you just include an #fb hashtag in funny and relevant tweets that you want to post to Facebook as well.
I personally am guilty of the auto-tweet-to-facebook. I do it because I often have lapses in FB access during my tours, and I use twitter to get observations/news to my FB network during that time; I’m curious about how many of my people are on both (maybe I should ask).
I have read that content should be shaped differently for the different social media (Chris Brogan, http://www.chrisbrogan.com, has a LOT of amazing things to say about marketing with social media, and online in general). You can promote the same event on both twitter and FB, but the message needs to be crafted and placed differently to take advantage of the features of each platform. I wish I had more specifics to share, but I’m still wrestling with that myself…
Great article as always!
Because “every” and “time” are two seperate words and therefore – like “a lot” – should not be conjoined.
But the hashtags thing has become more of a joke on facebook than an annoyance, so I thing re-posting is probably not THAT bad. The Event invites part is the most annoying thing to me, as a fan AND a comic.
I see more an more comics sending their tweets to autopost as Facebook profile status updates and it never occurred to me this might be a problem till reading this blog. I do however agree that it’s probably for the best that I can no longer autopost tweets to my comedy page-that really is supposed to be for “just the fans” and they can see it as lazy. But I don’t see anything wrong with auto tweeting to my profile page. In fact, at this point, if I were do tweet one and then log on to Facebook to copy paste the same thing, I’d feel very OCD about it and would likely get teased about it by anyone who was actually watching close enough to even notice.
“If you’re a professional comedian you are a content creator.” I might add to that: “original.”
Very good advice, helpful, gives me a lot to thunk about. You give ideas to use right away. Thanks for a terrific article.
I CAN’T STAND IT WHN CMEDNS USE ALL CAPS TO PRMOTE THERE SHW THATS BAD ENUF BUT THN IT USU. STANDS 2FOLLW THE SAME PPL KEEP ABBRVNG EWYTN TIL U CAN HRDLY UNDRSTND WHAT THEIR SAYIN AND ALSO DNT KNO HOW2 SPELL, PUNCTU8, OR USE THERE SPLLCHK FOR THE RIGHT USE OF THEIR, THERE, THEY’RE, YOUR, YOU’RE, ETC. When I see an event promoted like that, after I finish cringing, I automatically assume it’s going to be really dumbed-down humor and I’m not even interested in going to support them.
It drives me nuts to see comedians on Facebook call themselves “Comedian Joe Smith” or “So n’ So Comic.” Granted most of these comedians are beginners or struggling, but you would never see a FB profile that said “Comedian Chris Rock” or “Louis CK Comic.” Stop telling me you’re a comedian, just prove it by being funny once in a while.
I ever so slightly disagree with your second point. Auto posting helps my new fans get an idea as to what kind of humor I bring. I also use it to update when I might be appearing at a show unexpectedly or if I’m in the company of another comic they might know.
Instead of posting meaningless updates, be very purposeful in what what you tweet.
I am guilty of auto-posting my Twitter to my Facebook fan page but only recently. I have a regular Facebook profile and a separate comedy-oriented fan page. I used to text my status updates to my fan page but Facebook removed that feature for some reason. For a month, none of my statuses went through and I had no idea. Now, you can text to your profile but not your page. You can email a status with the status in the subject line but I am only able to post 40 characters in my subject line (at least from my phone’s Gmail app – which is what I use) and that’s worthless. So, I set up Twitter to auto-post and don’t feel good about it. I’m only really posting jokes and occasional (very seldom) show info. I don’t have a smart phone and I don’t always have access to a computer, what do I do? Is there a better option I haven’t thought of?
I have heard of comics asking their comic friends to “please go re-tweet my tweet” via text message.
…Wow.
Stop inviting other comics to all your shows, unless it marks a major landmark in your career. I know some comics who only friend other comics on FB and don’t have ‘civilian’ friends, who, in reality, are going to be the ones with the time and the resources to attend their shows.
Some people are thinking about moving from their Personal Profile to a Fan Page. I’ve been thinking of going the other way and shutting down my Fan Page and have everyone follow my Personal Profile so that I don’t have to keep posting things on both pages, and watering down the number of Likes and Comments by having it in two places. But maybe I’m a special case, because I make my personal life into my comedy, so there’s a bit overlap in my stuff. Jenna Marbles has a couple of million Likes on her Fan Page, but Dane Cook has 4 million Followers of his Personal Profile. So I guess either one can work. Does anyone have any thoughts on Fan Page vs Personal Profile? Does anyone know of comedians other than Dane Cook who make their Personal Profile their one Facebook outlet?