It’s popular wisdom that you’ll never get anything if you don’t ask for it, and variations of the bromide are oft repeated in the sales and marketing world (“You can’t close the sale if you don’t ask for the money!”).
One of my online marketing teachers, Christopher S. Penn, often encourages his readers to come right out and ask for re-tweets, comments, follows, etc. It works, and a recent experience with a Dream Local Digital client demonstrated the theory.
We helped children’s book illustrator Melissa Sweet launch a new Facebook business page. She had been using Facebook, but only had a personal page that, with more than 1,000 friends, had become unwieldy to manage as a marketing tool. Her business page started with just 60 or so fans, or “likes,” and we had to grow that number quickly.
Facebook offers business page administrators a handy tool for inviting your personal Facebook friends to like your business page. If you’re a page admin, you’ll find an “Invite Friends” near the top of the right column on your Facebook page. It took about an hour and 15 minutes over two days, but I sent invitations to all of the client’s personal friends to like the new business page. It yielded immediate results. Within two days, the business page had 300 new “likes.” About 30 percent of “friends” from her personal page, many of whom are fans but not personal friends, agreed to like the business page.
I encountered just one glitch during the invitation process, but it was significant. When I tried to invite 100 or so friends at one time, it appeared that not all of the invitations had been delivered. So, I limited the number of invitations and had to repeat the process many times (thus the 75 minutes spent on the task).