I decided to put up a Face Book page for Prime Timers of Central Iowa. I then started posting things of general interest to mature gay/bi men and we began to get people who "Liked" it. I then contacted those men who'd expressed some interest and asked if they'd like to be included in the mailing list. We developed a list of over 100 people fairly quickly. That began to create some buzz in the community about PTCI.
Recently, I decided to try to reach out to those men who may be more isolated and I placed an ad on Facebook for the group. (Once you have the page, you will see how to create an ad.) Through creating a series of filters while creating the ad, you can limit the distribution by age, sexual orientation, only friends of friends, geographical location, etc. Through that process our ad then would be distributed to about 1500 men.
You pay for each "click" on the ad, but the cost is rather minimal and you can budget a maximum amount you wish to spend. It was about three months after I set the page up that I began to promote it with the ad, and we then had a number of new names and faces.
It is important to interact with those who have expressed an interest. They then share the page with their friends.
I would recommend this especially to new chapters or those that need a little revitalization. I would also suggest that PTWW might want to use this as a tool to develop chapters in target communities.
