Let’s say my wife’s birthday was coming up. I have access to her Facebook account and want to send an invitation to a surprise party to all her friends, but I don’t want her to see anything that would spoil the surprise? How would I do this?
Although some of her friends are my friends, many aren’t, so somehow I want to tap into her friends list and send out a message. Thanks.
You can’t. Facebook is surprisingly not set up to let you hack someone’s account, send out messages and then erase all tracks.
You could just open up her friends list and contact them all through facebook, but for the people not also your friends, the message would go in the “other” inbox, that doesn’t trigger a notification and those messages may go no-where.
What’d I’d do, whether using facebook messages or email, is to send everyone you have direct contact information on a message about what you’re planning, and include all the people you’d like to invite but can’t contact directly. Chances are some of them can pass the message on and you’ll be able to reach all of them.
You basically need to access her friend’s list, and print out a full list. I don’t think there’s an easy way to export your own friend’s list via the FB page, but there may be a 3rd party application that would do that for you. I assume you’d have to be logged in as her to make that work.
But that’s time consuming, could be detected if you mess up, and would a wee bit creepy. Instead, I’d send all of your common friends a message, and add any that you know of but aren’t friends with, and ask them to forward it to others.
The easiest way might be to set up a private event and invite those folks, ask them to extend the invite there or send you names to add, and track things that way.
You can’t send a message from her account and expect it to remain secret. Besides the fact that she can see her sent messages, someone will screw up and reply to all even if you say not to.
Never tried it but I see there is a “Delete Conversation” option for Facebook private conversations. If you got on her account, messaged all her friends, and then deleted the conversation that might (heavy emphasis on might) approximate what you want. However you would have to tell her friends not to reply to the message, and hope they all cooperated.
If you send a message, she might not notice it was sent unless she checked her messages and noticed an inordinate amount of sent messages. I rarely send messages, so I probably wouldn’t notice.
However, if even one person accidentally responded, she would get a notification, and the jig would be up.
Once you set up an event, you can invite people who aren’t your friends- as long as you can find them on Facebook. As far as I can tell, they get the messages the same as your friends - there’s “other” box for event notifications