I have a friend who keeps inviting me to webinars where he pitches his make-money programs. I really like the guy, but hate his promotions. I don’t want to unfriend him, however, just block these event invitations showing up on my Facebook page. I can figure out how to delete the individual invitations, however, but I can’t figure out how to block him from inviting me to anything on Facebook. Help!
Oh I know exactly what you’re talking about. In fact, I teach a class on social media marketing and talk explicitly about how putting your business events on Facebook are a smart strategy, but if it’s not a ‘real’ event, it’s just annoying as heck, and since Facebook doesn’t have an “opt out” feature (well, sort of it does, but we’ll get to that in a sec) all of your “friends” are just stuck having your invitations show up all the time. Ugh.
As with many things in the Facebook universe, blocking someone from sending you event invitations isn’t something that they’re notified about, so you can not only block your friend from sending you invitations, you can also also remain friends with him. Just practice a neutral “huh? yeah, I’m busy anyway…” response. 🙂
In terms of how to block someone from sending you invitations, this is annoying too, because there are a lot of ways on Facebook to delete an event invitation, but to actually block someone? That’s way more complicated.
Let me show you what I mean…
First off, a common occurrence when you are invited to an event is for it to show up on your Notification menu:
It’s not obvious, but if you move your cursor into the notification area, an “X” appears. Click on the “X” and you have the option of deleting this item from the list:
Pay attention to the wording here, though. You’re not blocking this person from inviting you to other events, you’re just turning off further notifications from this particular event.
That’s not what we want.
Another possibility is to go to your Events area, where the invitation shows up looking like this:
Obviously, “Join”, “Maybe” and “Decline” aren’t useful in saying “please don’t send me invites from this person in the future”, but, again, move to the upper right and an “X” appears. Click on it and…
Nope. That’s not it either.
Ridiculous, isn’t it? In fact, to stop invitations from someone, you need to block their event invitations, which means you need to go to your Account settings:
Then on the left side look for “Blocking” and click on it:
The result is that there’s a long list of different types of blocks you can put in place, including the one we want, “Block event invites”:
Here you just need to type in your friend’s name and…
Once there’s a match, click on it and they’re blocked from sending you event invitations in the future. Not too difficult, really.
Oh, and Brian, sorry, you’re just a guinea pig. 🙂
You can use this chrome extension called “Facebook Invitations Blocker” which will provide a shield to protect you from who send a lot of invitations to events you don’t like or pages you don’t need to know and Games or Apps that you don’t care about!
Facebook Invitations Blocker will block and hide invitations from all users by selecting the type of invitation!
Hi,
One of the problems is that people don’t realize is that once you block some one they wont even show on the search results. So if you want them to show on the search results your going to have to unblock them again.
No. If you just block people from event invitations they will still show in search results, you will still be able to interact with them.
Blocking someone from inviting you to events is not the same thing as blocking someone completely. Check the screenshots in the article to see the difference.
Thank you! Excellent instructions. I didn’t even realize you could block individuals from sending event invitations. This will come in handy, as there are always a few who invite you to every event they come across!