Reader Diane recently sent in this question regarding friend lists on Facebook:

I found that the message section doesn't allow you to send to a list that has more than 20 people on the list. Is there a way around this issue?

In my earlier post, Create Friend Lists on Facebook, I mentioned that one of the advantages of creating such lists was that you could send a message to everyone on it at the same time.

I wasn't aware, though, that there was a limit on the number of people you could send a message to (so thanks for bringing this to my attention, Diane!).

To confirm this limitation, I created a test list with more than twenty people on it and typed in the name of the list on the Compose Message page. Sure enough, it wouldn't accept it.

Interestingly (or not), Facebook doesn't mention this restriction in their Help files, which says:

You can message a Friend List if you are in your Inbox. Entering the name of your Friend List into the "To" box will allow you to send a message to everyone on the list.

I'm assuming the reasoning behind this has something to do with trying to prevent spam. But since anyone in a friend list is, by definition, already a friend, I don't really see how this applies. And, even if they feel there needs to be some cut-off, 20 is WAY too low a number in my opinion.

The real nuisance is that it doesn't allow you to deselect names from the list then and there—you have to enter each person's name in separately (to a maximum of 20), which kind of defeats the purpose of having the list in the first place.

Another possibility would be to create several lists of 20 people each, purely for sending messages to. You could name them Group 1, Group 2, etc. to keep track of them and any time you become friends with someone new, add him or her to the last group. Then you could copy and paste the message and send it to each group in order. Of course, this might be feasible if you have only a few dozen friends or maybe even a couple of hundred. More than that is going to take you quite a while to set up the lists.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that if you tried to send the same message to too many groups close together, that might raise a Facebook flag as well, although I haven't found any specific reference to that.

Have you managed to find a workaround to this problem? If so, I'd love it if you could send me the info so I could share it with other readers as well.

*****

Updates

Reader Fern Reiss of Expertizing.com responded to my call for workarounds to this problem with the following great list of suggestions.

• I've organized my groups of generic friends into 20-person clusters by *geography* (rather than group 1, group 2, etc) so that when I'm doing a book tour, I can easily Facebook all my friends in Los Angeles (Los Angeles 1, Los Angeles 2, etc.) or Chicago depending on where I'm going.
• I've organized many of my other friends by profession (which is how I text them); so for example, I have one friend list of librarians, one friend list of independent bookstores, one friend list of journalists, and so forth.
• Rather than messing with all this, if you have your friends all sign up to be members of a group (I run the "writing and publishing" group on Facebook, so many of my friends are there) you can message all of them anytime you like.
• You can also post to the walls of any friends who are signed up on a fan page. That has pluses and minuses—it's less private than the messages you can send to members of a group, but it means you're distributing the message to the walls of all those fans, thus possibly exposing your message to many more people.

I really love her idea of creating a Facebook Group for your friends because, unlike a Page, you can restrict the group's membership so that only people you invite can join it.

Thanks Fern!

Posted in Facebook,How To,Reader Questions,Social Media,Updates