It’s easy to fill your Facebook network with friends who are interested in what your business offers. It’s as easy as finding a Facebook group that caters to your potential customers and inviting the members to be your friend.
As you expand your network, here are a couple things to keep in mind.
When I invite someone to be my friend, here’s what my message generally says, and I’ve got it copied down so I don’t have to type it over and over again. Here’s what it says: “Hi (name), I notice we’re both part of the same (name of group). I’m looking for friends in (type of industry the group caters to). What is your interest in (group topic). Tell me a bit about what you do.”
Notice I not trying to talk about my business or pitch them anything. I’m asking them about themselves, and just because I’m sending this out to many people doesn’t mean I’m not interested in them as individuals. I am interested, and I hope that they respond to my questions and we can get to know each other.
Most people will accept me as a friend and become part of my network, and one or two out of 10 people will actually respond to my message. When they do, I’ll get a chance to get to know them and find out if my business offers something they would be interested in. I’ll show you how I recommend doing that in another tutorial.
A couple of guidelines while doing this:
Don’t send out a whole ton of friend requests at once. You don’t want to invite more than about 30 people a day to be your friend. It was somewhere between 40 and 50 that I got a stern message from Facebook telling me I was abusing their system.
30 is safe. There are software programs out there that will send out hundreds of invites for you a day, and Facebook doesn’t like that and will shut down your account if they think you’re doing that. I’ve looked at a couple of those programs and I’m sure they’re fine, but it takes me about 5 minutes to invite 30 people to be my friend, so I’ve never bothered automating it.
So within a few minutes you’ve got a couple dozen new friends who are in your target market. This is a good start because you’re going to be communicating with them individually and collectively, you can get their help improving your web site, and if you decide to start your own Facebook group these people are going to be some of the first members.
So that’s how you fill your Facebook network with people from your target market on a few minutes a day, and once you’ve done that then communicating with them in a quick and effective manner is the next step.