Facebook always feels a bit challenging to me. Their rules are published nowhere you can find easily and most are pretty indecipherable. Often you won’t know you’ve broken one, until you get slapped. Yet, it is the largest social network globally and you certainly don’t want to ignore it. Now, if you are using it strictly for family and friends and catching up with old flames and older relatives, stop reading now. This isn’t for you. On the other hand, when you want to move business forward, keeping your friends clean on Facebook does matter.
The biggest task you can tackle is to get all of your friends into appropriate lists. This will give you awesome leverage when you create an event and want to invite a selected group. Without this, you are stuck going friend to friend and when you have several hundred or a couple of thousand, this is a major time zapper and ineffective. So do your work upfront. Before you accept anyone as a friend, check them out, which list can you tag them to (that you’ve created). Yes, you can put a friend on more than one list, great flexibility. The key is to get them onto at least one list that is relevant and pertinent.
Oh and while you are at it, when you are doing this, it is likely you are having to go to many of the profiles as you may not know the person well. Take a minute and write something warm and friendly on their wall. This will boost your visibility and show them you truly care. (You do care, don’t you?)
I’m giving you an out. This whole idea may overwhelm you. You can establish criteria for friends to be tagged on specific lists and hand the task off to a VA (Virtual Assistant). You can also script (you’d be surprised how many do this and no one knows it) a series of messages that your VA can post on friends walls. While I encourage you to do this personally, I am well aware that you may be already stretched thin but do care and want your peeps to know that.
And one more thing, when you go through your friends, you are likely to find that you may have been a bit careless (unless you are perfect, and you might be!) and accepted some folks that you are no longer certain you want to be friends with for a number of reasons. It is okay to unfriend them, they won’t be notified. You have a 5000 friend limit and if that matters then this is what you’ll need to do. You can also invite peeps to be a fan on your fan page (you do have a fan page don’t you?) There is no limit to the number of fans.
Social networking can be fun; it can also be a lot of work and time. I share time saving tips to drive your business forward. Next week is LinkedIN, and it will be on my blog!
First, these are NOT the things Facebook will ban you. I thought that’s what the topic was. FB has its own rules, which they don’t tell you about. It’s possible to be re-activated if they take you down, but not always. And you rarely will find out what you did wrong, so it doesn’t happen again.
Plus, as far as “clean,” I thought you meant no swearing (oops, am I in trouble, cos today with the new FB interface, I let out with words I rarely use.)
Wow a VA. First, how to find competent people? Secondly, are they affordable? I just love how peeps make this so simple when we offshore our work. That is simply not viable for many.
As for scripts, where are they and how to use them? Unless you mean write some statements for your VA to copy/paste, rather than create from scratch all the time. The reason people don’t use VAs or programming scripts is exactly that: where to find and how to implement.
I don’t want to be a downer, but there is nothing more worthless than giving advice and then no info how to implement it or being ambiguous.
I’m a fan of yours, received some of your emailings. You can and do better than this posting, Melissa. We need Facebook guidance, but this was minimally helpful.
Jenny,
I appreciate your comments. This played off of last week’s so I made the error of not sharing that this was not about bad language. Perhaps you didn’t see that post. I didn’t say that these are the things that would get you booted, I simply said that FB has indecipherable rules which they do. I know I’ve been slapped before and then put back up with an apology. My Keeping It Clean reference is about keeping your friends lists clean (on Twitter your followers), on LinkedIN it will be your connects.
As to VA’s my bad, I forget that not everyone has listened in to the many FREE teleseminars and webinars I give and will clarify in the future in a separate posts, or I’ll wind up with a small novel. VA’s range from $3/overseas to $15-$75/domestic. I have addressed this previously clearly I need to again.
Scripts, same thing, I’ll clearly write another post. It seems the issue with this post is that it wasn’t deep enough and tackled too many topics superficially. My regrets for your frustration and my appreciation for your comments. If you have not had the opp to catch a virtual event by phone or webcast, I think you will find them of great value. I find it challenging to limit my content and err on the side of over delivering. In an attempt to keep posts to a length that is skimmable (so few actually read, you are rare and valued) I erred on the under delivery side.
Again, thank you for feedback.
Hi Melissa,
I found your Facebook Fan page through Cindy Hudson. I enjoyed this article and I can use the tips that you presented here. Gosh I have no lists setup. Very inofrmative and helpful. I also see that you are in the Atlanta, Ga. area. That is great I am relocating back there this summer. I believe I will be in need of your assistance later this year. Thank you so much again for this article.
Sincerely,
Lisa E. Dunn