The first step to marketing your business on Facebook is to fill your network with people who are interested in what you offer. So the first thing you need to do is finding people in your target market, and the second thing is invite them to be your friend. When somebody becomes a part of your friend network, you are then able to communicate with them, build a relationship them, and market to them. Here’s how you quickly and easily expand your network: To get started, where do you find the best people to add to your network? You want a network full of potential customers, and to find these people you simply need to know who you cater to and then search for them. If you cater to small business owners, like I do, type in “small business” in the search bar on Facebook and see what groups pop up. Take a look at the different groups, and look for one that would attract, in this example, small business owners. I usually look for a group with over 1,000 people. Find one, join it, and then take a look at the members. At this point all you have to do is click on someone’s name and invite them to be your friend. I suggest you leave a little message telling them how you know them and ask a question about themselves that would get them to open up and respond to you. And I like personalizing it with their name. 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.

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There are a lot of ways to find customers in your Facebook network of friends, but most of them are not effective. Here’s how to introduce yourself to people on Facebook to find new customers quickly and effectively.When you find someone on Facebook that is a potential customer (either by the groups they belong to, the books they read, the business they run, or any number of other clues), you want to invite them to be your friend. When you do, it’s a good idea to leave them a message describing how you know them and asking them something about them selves. For example: “Hi Matthew, I notice we’re both part of a small business group. I’m looking for friends in business. What’s your company? Tell me a bit about what you do.”If you don’t hear from somebody but they accept you as a friend, you are then welcome to send them another note similar to: “Good to have you as a friend, John! I don’t think I know you personally. Tell me something interesting about yourself. What is it that you do?”These are the exact messages I use to get in contact with potential customers on Facebook. People generally respond well to them because I’m asking them questions about themselves. People love talking about themselves. When people start responding to these messages, you want to ask them more questions. Questions make three things possible. With them you can easily:1) draw people into a conversation2) control the conversation so it doesn’t wander off onto some other topic, and 3) keep the conversation as short as possible. We, as business people, are not interested in wasting time. So you want to keep these conversations short while still being social and conversational. To do this, you must know exactly what information you’re looking for so you can guide the conversation. For example, I teach business owners how to get more traffic to their web site. That being the case, the first message I send to someone I want to find out if they run their own business (which is why I ask “What is it that you do?” in the examples above).If they do run their own business, I want to find out if they have a web site.If they do, I want to find out if they’d like to get more traffic to that site. If they do, then I have established a connection with a potential customer. I can now offer them my services. I can even give them free advice based on their situation and really score points with my potential customers. It’s very simple: Keep your emails short and to the point, and ask them questions about themselves to find out if they’d benefit from what your business offers. You can find many new leads a day this way, and the great thing is you have established a personal connection with them in the process.

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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.

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When you are marketing your business on Facebook, there are so many ways to communicate with somebody (instant messages, regular messages, writing on people’s walls, through group discussions, etc…) that you can easily lose track of people and potential customers will slip through the cracks. Here’s how to keep track of everyone. First of all, you want to do all your communicating through Facebook’s messages system. Facebook messages are found when you click on the “inbox” tab. It’s basically like email–all your messages are saved there in chronological order. There are several advantages to Facebook messages:1) Any message you send and receive is saved in Facebook’s system2) These messages can be searched3) Messages are easily found and resumed again4) You can search by a person’s name and see if you’ve ever communicated with them before and what you talked about. For example, if I get a message from a potential customer I don’t recognize, I can plug their name into this search bar and see everything we’ve talked about in the past. This is handy because I talk with a lot of prospects and if someone contacts me out of the blue I want to be able to see what kind of history we have. Facebook’s message system makes this possible. For this reason, you want to move all your communication to messages. If a potential customer writes on your wall, copy what they wrote and reply to them via a message. If you meet somebody in a group, send them a message to document that meeting so you can remind yourself where you met. If you talk with someone by instant message, after you get done talking send them a message thanking them for the conversation and add a quick recap of what you talked about. This is more for you than it is for them. Even though the message is a nice courtesy for them (so it’s good to do anyways), it’s especially good for keeping track of what you’ve talked about with that person so you can reference it in the future if needs be. And that is how you can keep track of all your prospects on Facebook.

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There are many ways to find potential customers on Facebook, but many of those methods take too long or are mostly ineffective. Here’s a short exercise you can complete in five minutes a day to attract hundreds of Facebook customers every month. Here’s how it works:People on Facebook are looking for answers to their problems. If you have the answer, people will come to you in droves. To provide answers to potential customers on Facebook, the first thing I do is write an article or create a video with answers to my prospective customer’s questions. Once I’ve done this, I’ll place that article or video on my web site. With that in place, all I do is visit groups all over Facebook that cater to my target market, and I post discussion topics on that group’s page. On one group I’ll post a tutorial on effective email marketing. On another I’ll talk about how to get traffic through videos or social networking sites. These discussions appear here on the group discussion board. When someone clicks on this discussion, they see a short introduction and a link to my web site. Once people visit my site, they learn some great information and they’re invited to join my email list–and a lot of people join. It’s pretty simple. The only trick to this is creating useful articles and tutorials on topics your target market cares about. Once you do, you can use that tutorial to bring people to your web site over and over again. I suggest having many tutorials on a variety of topics, and continually create more all the time. It’s good to have many articles and tutorials ready for posting, because over days and months you want to post different discussions on the same group’s board and attract new and different people each time. Having a variety of tutorials also makes it possible to for you to post many discussions on many boards in a single day. If you post 5 discussions on 5 different boards, you want each discussion to be on a different topic from each other because people often belong to several groups and if they visit several groups that day and see you’ve posted the same discussion over and over again, you’ll lose credibility with them quickly. So it’s nice to have a variety of discussions to choose from. I attract hundreds of Facebook users to my site each month, and only spend a few minutes a day. You can do this too.

Technorati Tags: Business, facebook, groups, increase, Marketing, Small, Social, Strategies, Tips, Traffic, website

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