How to Connect with Influential People on Facebook
This is the third in a series about social media marketing using Facebook by guest blogger, Alexander Alaric.
It’s great to have thousands and thousands of friends, but building a relationship with just one person who is highly influential in your market could be more valuable to you than all the rest of your Facebook friends put together.
To get these folks on board, start by making a list of between 30 to 50 of the top influencers in your market.
Keep in mind that these are busy people and that they have new people contacting them all the time who also want to use their expert power, so you will need to decide how you are going to set yourself apart from the crowd to get their attention and make them want to help you.
The easiest way to connect with these power brokers is to offer to do something for them first because this starts the ball rolling.
In simplest terms, “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours”.
So when you help get the word out about their business or their product or give them a testimonial they will be more inclined to help you after you’ve done that for them.
Most people I see make the mistake of asking for something before first giving something.
Don’t make this mistake because getting them to accept your friend request is all you want to do righ now. Then you can deepen the connection with further communication and offers to assist them.
You do this because the power of your network can really be more important than the size of your network. As well the strength of the relationships you have with those people in your network can be far more powerful than the size of your network.
You can open the lines of communication by sending them an e-mail asking about their business, what they’re working on, or what you could do to help spread the word about their business.
You can also make a text post on their “wall”. This is something unique to facebook (myspace.com calls it ‘comments’) which allows you to post a text message on to their profile that they and anyone who views their profile will see.
There is now also a cool floating bar that hovers at the bottom of your screen when you’re logged in to facebook which tells you how many of your friends are currently online and gives you the opportunity to have a live text chat with them. So you can have an instant messenger type conversation with those big influencers when they’re online. Using this tool alone could be a great way for you to get your foot in the door with power brokers in your industry.
Do it today. Make your list of influential people in your market and start making friends in high places.
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Rosalind Gardner is a Super Affiliate blogger, author, speaker, and Internet marketing consultant.
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I joined facebook late last year and from what I saw, I got the impression that it was just a social networking site. But I still felt there must be a way one could network business wise. Slowly by slowly, I’m beggining to find some online marketing groups and thanks to your tips in this post I think I am on the right road to use the networking “power of facebook”
Hi. Thanks for the great info. I started trying it out, so we’ll see what happens.
I do have a question, tho. I have two niche markets that I work with. One is little fuzzy animals (webkinz), the other is parenting. Is there a way to set up a friends list or profile so that those people who are webkinz-related (and the blog and website information for me that is completely different) are separate from those who are parenting-related? Or, perhaps a way to set up two business-related “profiles” so that the two aren’t mixed? I know that Facebook requires only one account, which is fine… but how do people manage to separate personal from business and/or one business from another business?
I can see from poking around on Facebook that the folks with whom I’m going to interact about parenting toddlers are completely separate from those for webkinz (and also separate from the high school friends I bumped into along the way). I wouldn’t want to annoy them by sending an invitation to an event for webkinz if they know me for advice on temper tantrums.
Any advice would be most appreciated. Thanks.
Fred,
Glad to see you are dipping your toe in the water and finding some success.
Liz,
There are a couple ways you have to do it.
First, you can setup ‘friend list’ within your account. In your case I’d advise a webkinz list and a parenting list. This is the easiest but probably not the best.
Also, everything I’ve heard from Facebook and talking with others says FB is totally fine with having 2 separate accounts…1 for business and 1 for personal. DOn’t go overboard and setup 5 accounts though.
I would tell you to setup a separate personal account for your friends and a business account for your webkinz and parenting friends. Then send invites to your events to the appropriate group of friends.
How do you get google love from facebook and other social networks? Is it the more people you have in your friends etc.
Thanks