Writing Facebook posts about Tea With Strangers to get people you don’t know to come to tea time

A disproportionate amount of our favorite attendees come from the friends and friends-of-friends of our Host Community

It’s not so much about getting your friends to come to your tea time as it is about letting them know it exists (and getting their friends to come to tea times).

Take a second (at least) to think about your story.

This might help:

• What are you talking about when you talk about Tea With Strangers? →

People learning about TWS will resonate far more strongly with why you’re doing this, why you think it matters, how you learned about it, and your own experience of overcoming the inherent awkwardness that is TWS.

Great shares also often include:

• A call to friends to tell their friends or tag them in comments
• Tags to other hosts (find them in TWS Worldwide), the TWS fb page, me, or friends that you think would love TWS
• Visibility to “Friends of friends” or “Public”
• A link to a specific tea time page OR the general tea times page
• Call out “people who I’ve been friends with on Facebook but don’t actually talk to” (we all have em 😬)
• Have some links handy to help people understand TWS if they ask you questions (here’s a page with a bunch of em :)

And here are dozens of examples of existing Hosts writing Facebook posts about TWS.

Also, a bunch of social media friendly TWS graphics here →

A note about marketing

If marketing feels icky or generally uncomfortable for you, we get it. But also, take a sec to think about how we grow and get people to attend tea time.

TWS is fueled by good will. For us, it’s better than paid marketing or expensive advertising.

Also, TWS has historically spread almost entirely on Facebook and through direct word of mouth, so lots of the tips and suggestions here are skewed towards that.

We do strongly encourage directly messaging people — text, Messenger, WhatsApp, and email are super effective ways to get the word out. They might not “scale” as well as the public posts shown here, but people respond far differently when spoken to directly than when they see a post.