Disclaimers up front: This is just me – I haven’t heard anything remotely “official,” but I’d just like to call it right now so that I can point back to this blog post and yell “I told you so.”

My prediction – Facebook is about to put some heavy restrictions on Event invitations.

I don’t know about you, but I get about 6-10 invites a day – about 90% of them the equivalent of spam or non-events (“You are invited to the event Donate to my favorite charity” or my personal favorite… “I lost my phone so send me your phone number! Will you attend this event? Yes/No/Maybe”). This is a complaint about Facebook I am hearing more and more.

Facebook grew to its #1 status and has held onto it for years by not falling victim to the mistakes of MySpace and others – it did not become the playground for spammers and weirdos. Almost every post in my news feed these days is stuff I care about – Since the last major up date to the News Feed I hardly even see those annoying quizzes anymore. The same cannot be said for the “invitations” I receive to “events.”

The problem is that individuals and Fan Pages have figured out that event invites are one of the only ways to get a message right to the inbox your entire friend (or fan) list. Regular messages have restrictions of 20 carbon copies. It’s not unusual for FB users to have hundreds of friends. This is resulting in people (myself included) “inviting” people to non-events just as a way to send a mass email to all your Facebook friends.

Too much abuse of this “privilege” and Facebook is going to do what it has always done, restrict, filter or otherwise stop those who attempt to game the system – most likely without warning. And even if it makes my job as a Social Media marketer a little more difficult, I can’t say that I will be sorry to see them do it. Making changes like that is what keeps Facebook a vibrant social networking site and fertile social media marketing ground!

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Web