**Guest post written by Andrew Jones of Checkered Owl Media.

"If you work in the live music industry, you spend a lot of time inviting people to concerts. Hopefully you are inviting them with a variety of methods, Facebook events being one. Which is great as long as you do it properly.

I get invited to a TON of shows, that's the glorious nature of being friends with so many bands and promoters. There is always something going on, there is always too much going on really. The byproduct is that you receive a lot of Facebook event invites, which is great - great FB events get you all the details and can be a perfect way to get show info; HOWEVER, there is one kind of invite that becomes REALLY tiresome:

Invites to shows that are nowhere near me.

Now, every once and a while someone may be genuinely confused, maybe they met me in Calgary and keep inviting me to Calgary shows, no biggie. I may reach out to let you know, but we all get confused sometimes. The thing that will get under your fans' skin is the generic shotgun blast invite everyone to everything. I am obviously not going to come to your shows in Toronto, Winnipeg, Regina, Boston, Portland, Vancouver and Calgary, so don’t invite me. This isn’t confusion, it’s laziness.

It only makes your invites less effective.

When you keep seeing the same basic information over and over that doesn’t apply to you, pretty soon you brain stops really taking in that information. Our brains know that they can’t handle every little detail they see in a day, so it categorizes things in order of importance. When your event is continually irrelevant to your listeners, pretty soon…it goes into the wrong bin, it’s irrelevant.

But it’s hard work to invite everyone! It’s slow! I can’t possibly know where all 2700 of these people are from!

Yes, it is harder, but it’s more effective. It is a bit slow, BUT Facebook has given you the tools to make it not so very painful AND to make sure you can find the right people AND it’s free! If you don’t know about Graph search yet, you are missing out. Here is how it works:

In the search bar you type: My friends who live in __________

Facebook will then display a list of all your friends who live in that city. Killer.

Now, open up a separate window.

You could use a tab, but having two windows side-by-side will make this go much faster. As you go down the list, simply type the name of the person and invite. I takes time but it’s really not bad at all. And that’s just the beginning of how musicians can take advantage of graph search…but that’s for another post!"

Related Blog Posts:

+Facebook Advertising 101 For Bands & Musicians

+Social Media: The Best Friend A Musician Never Wanted

+5 Ways Bands and Musicians Can Leverage Social Media