It's easy to fill your Facebook friends list with people who might be interested in what your business offers. You can join groups catering to your target market and connect with people there. But once you're friends, how do you contact these people and get a conversation going so you can see if they want what you offer?
When you add someone as a friend you want to leave them a message that prompts them to write you back, but when you do that you still only get maybe 2 ~ 3 out of ten people to write to you. People get so many friend requests that they tend to just accept every request they get and ignore messages.
Most notes people write to you when they give you a friend request are generic so most people usually ignore them, so when somebody ignores your message you need to find a way to get in touch with your new friends because they're a potential customer. Here's how to do that.
Once someone is your friend, they'll show up in this "recently added" list under your "friends" tab. What you can do from here is click on somebody's name, and send them a message. Do you think I know you personally. What is it that you do? "
Now my whole purpose in sending this message is to turn them into my customer, but I do not want to go blabbing about my business right off the bat. You will not get any response that way.
With a quick personal message like this I can contact a couple people a minute and get quite a few people writing back to me. Once they write back, I can find out pretty quickly if they're interested in what I offer, and I can do it all by asking them questions about themselves.
Questions make three things possible. With them I can easily:
1) draw people into a conversation
2) control the conversation so it does not 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. I'll have tips on how to do that in my next article.
