7 Strategies for getting your team started on Facebook

Get people excited by demonstrating how powerful the platform is

A lot of people still have the same resistance to Facebook as they do to Twitter. They’ve heard it’s a social site where people do meaningless mundane updates on what they ate for lunch. The fastest way to change their perception is by showing them your own account. Since most people are visual, the best way to do this is by doing a Skype screenshare. Give them a quick tour of your wall and the walls of other successful marketers so that they can see the powerful interactions going on and the relationships being formed. Let them watch over your shoulder as you go in and post updates and engage with people. Demonstrate the strategy behind tagging people using the @ symbol.

Walk them through their profile set up

It might sound like a no brainer, but not a day goes by where I don’t see someone on the Social Networks without their profile and bio set up. Even worse, a photo that’s not their own! Do not let anyone in your team become a ‘Fakebooker’! Talk to them about what they want to be known for in their industry and develop a branding strategy around that.

If they are employed full time, it’s critical that you walk them through the basics of the privacy settings so that their marketing posts don’t end up on google for their employer to see.

Brainstorm their niche

Find out the persons likes and interests are so you can help devise a friend adding strategy relative to their niche. E.g if one of the benefits of the product they promote is enhanced athletic perfomance , it sounds logical to go out and friend other athletes. But this is only true if they have a passion for the topic itself outside of any marketing. Help them find a match between their target market and what they’re naturally passionate about talking about. While having 1000 friends might sound powerful, it’s meaningless to have 1000 friends who have no interest in what you like to talk about.

Targeted friend adding and building relationships with influencers

This strategy has two components:

• A general but targeted friend adding strategy
• A more focused strategy based on connecting with people of influence and potential JV partners

The first step is to use the import your email list and skype contacts feature.  This is the fastest way for a new person to go from no friends to some friends almost immediately.
The next step is to start making connections with like minded people through groups and pages. As an entrepreneur, some of the best places to start with are the ones created around well known authors on the topic of their niche. For example, if you do a search on Facebook for Robert Kiyosaki, you’ll find close to 200,00 people have liked this page. Are you kidding me! Over 200,000 budding or established entrepreneurs to connect with! Are you loving how powerful this is yet?

As Facebook doesn’t publish the daily limit on friend requests, play safe and stay with around 30 a day

In order to create a super responsive and engaging friends list, I would suggest only actively seeking out and sending friend requests until you have your first 100- 200. The purpose behind this strategy is that once you are actively engaging with your initial community, friend requests from their friends will start naturally flowing in on a daily basis. When people request to be your friend because they liked the valuable comment you left on one of their friends pages, the connection is immediately more powerful. Growing an ‘organic’ following on Facebook is key if you want powerful connections, rather than numbers.

The second strategy is more targeted and focused. This is about concentrating on specific relationships with people of influence or thought leaders in your niche. So as well as the general friend adding strategy, you want to be actively friending and directly connecting with 3-5 people a week that have influence in your industry. The bulk of your time should be spent building solid relationships with these people.

Always include a personal note letting the person know why you would like to connect. If you can include something you both have in common before you send the request, you are planting the seed for a powerful future relationship.

What to post in Facebook status updates

For someone brand new, this is actually quite a daunting question.

• How personal should I be?
• What do I post about?
• Do I let everyone know about my business opportunity?

Ok so lets address the first one. If you are on Facebook as a marketer, you need a balanced approach to how personal you should be. It’s a social site so by all means be social and be yourself. Afterall, it’s the human side that makes this platform so powerful! Having said that, you will eventually have an audience of thousands of people potentially viewing your status updates. Is it going to benefit your brand if you post every detail of your pending relationship break up? This is not about being false, it’s also about respecting others. People don’t log into Facebook to be burdened by problems they might already be facing in their own lives. Sure if you’re having a bad day, post it but add some sort of engaging or light hearted twist to it. Just be mindful of posting negative personal updates that draw people into any drama.

So what do we say in our status updates? A good question here would be, what do you like to see in other peoples status updates? I’m guessing this would be anything that is entertaining, educational, enlightening or engaging. There are no rules here and don’t forget people love controversy!

From what we know about Facebooks News Feed algorithm (more details in the next post), links and videos are favored over status updates. Some of the best places to find interesting posts to link to are:

• Digg
• Simple Truths
• PopURL’s
• Youtube
• Your favorite blogs

Don’t get too hung up on what to post, after all it’s you people are connecting with.

If you are posting about your opportunity, remember the 90/10 rule of value vs marketing.  Provide value and people will become naturally curious if you keep your opportunity posts less blatant.  E.g. “Wow check this out myopportunity” vs “Totally excited about some of the new marketing strategies my team are testing out.” It also goes without saying that you shouldn’t be falsely friending people with the intention of spamming people with private ‘my opportunity’ messages.

Set up a Facebook support tribe

While engaging on Facebook might seem like second nature to some of us, it can still be daunting for a new person. Imagine being brand new for a minute and every time you do a status update, not a single person replies or engages with you…

The fastest way to get a new person into the groove and generating buzz quickly is to set them up with their own mini tribe

Get them connected with a small inner circle of others who agree to comment on each others updates. This is also critical if you want to be showing up in your friends newsfeed. One of the reasons people post updates that have zero likes or comments is because the update hasn’t appeared in your friends News Feed. As Facebook doesn’t favor new people, it’s very easy to become completely invisible in the news feed until your affinity score increases. Although Facebook doesn’t reveal the exact details on how the score is calculated, inbound activity plays a huge part. Just as Facebooks NewsFeed algorithim favors links and videos over text updates, comments are also favored over ‘likes’.

The art of engaging on Facebook

This topic is so important it literally deserves a separate post as even fortune 500 companies are still struggling with getting this right. What a lot of people, and companies view as engagement is a form of shout marketing. In the case of a company this would be constant updates that aren’t that dissimilar to an ad. Online entrepreneurs also fall into this trap by constantly posting updates that don’t invite people into the conversation. Facebook is a Social Media platform, not a Me Me Media platform!

The simplest way to get people engaged is by asking questions. Not only do people love to answer questions, but by inviting people into a topic you give them the chance to shine in front of your audience. And people love to hang out where they can look good! Once you do have an engageing update happening, it’s important to make the contributors feel valued and acknowledge. If you like some of the replies, take a nano second to click the like button. Acknowledge as many of the commenters as possible with an @theirname reply and if it makes sense, draw them back in with another question. People are missing out on a huge amount of rapport building because they sit back and ignore an update once it takes on some life.

The same goes for joining conversations on other peoples updates.  If you are late to the party, take the time to read through some of the other comments before you join in. If you like what someone else has written, start your reply with a response to @friend1 before you offer your own comment. I continually receive friend requests (often within minutes) of using this strategy.

None of this means anything if you are not taking these friendships and relationships and building them offline

While public interactions on Facebook are incredibly powerful for rapport building and positioning, behind the scenes is where business really happens. As soon as you click with someone, send them a message asking to connect on Skype or the phone. The great thing about connections that start on Facebook, is by the time you do speak to someone offline, they already know, like and trust you. Now thats a powerful basis to start any potential business relationship from!

In the next post I’ll be going into the in’s and out’s of Facebooks NewsFeed optimisation, and why it’s important to understand how it works.

If you enjoyed this post or have some tips to share that I’ve missed, please leave me a comment below. If you think this information might help others to get started, don’t forget to share it on Facebook.

Michaele