Making Friends in the online Social Networks

Posted by admin

If you can remember the first time you signed up for Facebook and you had no friends or very few. You hear all these strategies for utilizing these platforms but with few friends to start with, its kind of hard to be taken seriously.


I am often asked where to start?

Social marketing is all about getting the most out of social networks. Here are some important friending techniques to be aware of:

Step 1 - Creating your networks

First of all, create your presence on different social networks like facebook, MySpace and Linkedin. Set up your accounts and customize your pages.

Step 2- Adding people to your network

Once you have your pages all set up, you need to get people onto your network. First of all make sure you can distinctly define what kind of people you would want to add as friends. These will be people who can benefit your business in any way. People who are part of your market segments, people who are domain experts, people who can benefit you through synergies, people who are influential in the industry, people who look up to you as an expert.. etc

There are different levels of potential friends on social networks: First of all, add all of those people that you know directly. If you know someone, then approach them in an a way you would to a real human being and not a robot. That is, introduce yourself.

I get friends requests all the time from spammers who use automated software for friending or cut and paste the same message to hundreds of people they find in other people’s friend networks. Be realistic - thats no way to befriend people. Be warned that if you do this you can be locked out of the platform for spamming, your IP address can be blocked from ever accessing the domain again. Recipients can click a link in each request that says, “report as spam”. A few of these reports against your name and you’re out of the game.

So when finding old acquaintances out of the blue, approach them like you would if you had seen them in a crowded bar. I’m assuming that if you come across them after a long while; you would walk over, re-introduce yourself and engage them in brief conversation after which you would initiate a desire to share contact details to remain in contact.

Its no different in these online networks, except that the crowded bar extends across the globe and its open 24/7 and you don’t need to exchange contact details. You simply send a friend request.

Next, you can introduce yourself to the friends of your friends by letting them know who you know in common. It’s not recommended to say “hi, I am a friend of John Smiths do you want to be friends on Facebook” - although a lot of folks do adopt this tactic.

I prefer to look at the persons profile to find something in common. I then introduce myself on the basis of our common friend and try to reference the topic that person seems interested in. Its an idea to be positive and complimentary where you can and end your comment with a question so it’s easy for the recipient to reply. If done right you can come back at their reply and before you know it you’re no longer strangers - so at a convenient time you can ask them if they would like to hook up as friends.

Thirdly you can search for groups in whatever niche you’re into and invite the people in these groups to become friends. Its recommended to join the group first and always contribute to the conversations in the group in an intelligent way before attempting to friend its members.

Expand your network as much as you possibly can.

Follow and be followed:

Find people that you want to have on your lists and follow them on twitter and other social network sites. Later, send them invites - a good percentage of them will accept. Social networking is all about following and being followed. Its about giving first and then expecting something in return. The more you follow and the more you contribute towards adding value to the more you will be followed in return.

The rule of thumb is the more value you bring to other people’s daily lives by what you do and say; the more people will follow you. Its no different to life offline, really except its far less forgiving than real life.

Web2.0 platforms take life as it has always been and makes it possible to maintain relationships with far more people that the offline world ever could. It takes away the factors of space, distances, traveling and communication logistics - and viola, there is no limit to the number of people you can befriend online. Um, yes, you will need high-speed internet though. This changes the social dynamics somewhat, which I will go into in another post but the thing you need to be careful about is that in the online world everything is recorded.

Everything you do leaves a footprint so there is less room for error. Offline if you say something you regret to someone, the damage can be limited to those who hear you say it first hand, those that hear what you said second hand and to a lesser extent those who hear it third hand.

Make the same mistake online and what you did or said can haunt you for life, so be careful.

A good writeup from the blogging world around us…

What Social Networking Can Do For You - Social networking is literally the way of the future.

Facebook 2 - Expanding your network

Posted by writer

Networking on Facebook can be broken down into two initial steps:

1- Finding existing friends
2- Joining groups


Finding friends: Once you have your profile all nicely set up. Look for people that you already know from your past or present life that are on facebook. It doesn’t matter whether or not you think they fit your market segments - the bigger your network the better it will be. So, get down to some serious people hunting. Remember not to add people that you don’t already know or they may report you as spammers.

A few great ways to find your friends are:

1- get Facebook to check addresses from your email account to see if anyone has a Facebook profile. (this can be done automatically, in the “find friends” section)

2- search for people from your schools and colleges based on your years of graduation. (this can be done using the “more ways to find friends” option at the bottom)

3- search for activities that you have been involved with to see if there any Facebook groups for them. This could be anything from childhood spacecamps to college sketching classes.

4- search for people using the search bar with their names. Make sure you’ve got the right person before sending them invites.

5- finally, go to the profiles of your Facebook friends and look at their friends network to see if you know anyone there.

Joining Groups: Once you have exhausted your ways of adding people that you know, the next step is to find people that you want on your page. These could be your target markets, your perfect audiences, possible future evangalists. Anyone. The way to do this is by finding groups that these people are in and joining those groups first. After having an active presence in the group, you can invite them to be on your friends lists. The best way for this would be to get them to add you instead. Some tips:

1- Make sure you join several networks instead of restricing yourself to just a handful. These groups should be chosen based on your targeted markets. To look for groups, simply select the “groups” section on your homepage, or you can browse through the groups recently joined by your friends to get a head start. Find those groups that are already active and have something going on all the time.

2- After joining, get a feel for the group first. Never start to promote yourself. Take time to participate, answer questions, get help, give help and build reputation and credibility amongst the group members.

3- Based on how well you participate, the members of the groups may want to start following your blogs or add you to their friend networks etc. Once you have this kind of following, you can announce events, find people to test your products, find people who can promote your products for you, get opinions and feedbacks and get a chance to really understand how your market behaves.