Facebook – Invite all of your friends to a page at the same time

A new friend I met in the world of writing  – Mr Jonathan Green – has decided to capitalise on the fact that he has written more Fighting Fantasy Books than any other mortal writer, and to celebrate 30 years of glorious murder, mayhem and mystery, by creating a kickstarter in order to fund a 30-year anniversary commemoration book.

This book will pay homage to Fighting Fantasy, a genre of fiction – You are the hero/choose your own fate/game books – that has taken the world by storm, and encouraged many reluctant readers to pick up a book and right wrongs whilst slaying a myriad of fantastical enemies. All this, and without needing to lug a PC around too!

In order to help promote the Kickstarter part of things, he has created a Facebook page – You Are The Hero – A History of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks. However, he now needs to promote that page and to get as many people as possible to like it, talk about it and share posts on it. Before he can do the last two, he has to get people to like it.

At some point, Facebook removed the ability to invite all of your friends to like your page in one go. Very unhelpful and inconsiderate of them, even though they probably thought that they were helping to protect us from spammers. This means that if you have 2,500 friends – for example – that you have to manually click on them to select them before you can then submit the invite. Tedious, and it can be a bit hit and miss.

Thankfully, people have got around this, and I have to thank my friend Paul O’Leary for pointing me in the right direction. I have found this immensely helpful and, just by using the invite feature, I was able to ‘reach’ over 900 people in one week, and increase the number of likes  by something like 500%.

After speaking to Jonathan, I realised that not many of my friends know about this, I certainly didn’t and – since Paul gave me the information for free – I thought I would write a ‘how to’ article and let as many people as I can know about it.

First off, I don’t care if you’re an IE, Safari, Firefox or anything else lover. You have to have Chrome for this to work best. So go get it.

Once you have downloaded and installed Chrome, things are really very simple.

Open up Chrome and go to Facebook, log-in with the account that has admin rights on the page that you want to promote. Go to the page that you want to spamvertise – nifty term that I invented.

Click on ‘Build Audience’
Then click on ‘Invite Friends’
The box for friends will come up and will show ‘Recent Interactions’ as the default.  Click on the ‘Recent Interactions’ and a drop-down menu will appear. Select ‘Search All Friends’, then scroll all the way down to the bottom. This can take some time, so be patient.
Once you’re at the bottom, click in the URL bar at the top of your browser screen, and paste the following;var x=document.getElementsByTagName(“input”);for(var i=0;i<x.length;i++) {if (x[i].type == ‘checkbox’) {x[i].click();}}; alert(‘Done, all your friends have been selected’);Then go to the START of this and type javascript: with no space between that and the ‘var’.Press Enter. Sit back and wait, it can take a few minutes to select them all.
You will then get the following message appear over the top of the Friends box.

Click okay and then click ‘Submit’ on the Friends box.

Facebook will then start to invite your friends. It won’t invite them all at the same time however. As you can see from the screenshots above I have a number of people showing as not having been invited. That’s not true, I invited them prior to writing this, but because Facebook drip-feeds the invites, people will show as being uninvited. It’s best to leave it at least three days before going back and checking. Obviously, if you ‘make’ new friends during that time, they will appear in the list of people that haven’t been invited.