We’re probably far enough along from the event for people not to know which one I am referring to, as I’ve no wish to embarrass the organizers.
Earlier in 2021, we saw a weekend event that would take place at the ‘Johnsonville Community Hub’. No address was given other than that. Both Duck Duck Go and Google seemed to think this meant Waitohi, the new library and swimming pool complex.
We arrived there to find that no one knew of this event, but maybe we could try the community hall next door?
No joy.
There was the Collective Community Hub on Johnsonville Road but their website made it clear that it wasn’t open at the weekend.
We hung round Johnsonville for a bit and decided we would check out the Collective place, just to see it up close.
Sure enough, that’s where the event was—it was open at the weekend—and we got there after everyone had packed up.
They were very apologetic and we told them the above. They had noted, however, that there had been more information on Facebook.
To me, that’s a big mistake, because I don’t know what their Facebook page is, and even if I did, there was no guarantee I would see it for a variety of reasons. (Try loading any fan page on Facebook on mobile: the posts take unbearably long and few people would have the patience.) A search for the event on both Duck Duck Go and Google never showed a Facebook page, either.
A similar event posted its cancellation on Facebook exclusively, something which we didn’t know till we got there, and after getting puzzled looks from the party that had booked the venue, I randomly found one organizer’s page and clicked on his Facebook link. Again, nothing about the event itself came up on Duck Duck Go or on Google.
In the latter case, the organizer had the skills to make a web page, a normal one, so was it so hard to put the cancellation there?
You just can’t find things on Facebook. They don’t appear to be indexed. And if they are, they’re probably so far down the results’ pages that they won’t be seen. If you’re organizing an event, by all means, post there to those who use Facebook keenly (a much smaller number than you think, with engagement decreasing year after year), but it is no substitute for getting it into properly indexed event calendars or on to the web, where regular people will put in search terms and look for it.
Facebook is not the internet. Thank God.
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