Choosing which classes to attend at an educational conference can be overwhelming.
I definitely had to make some tough choices at the Keller Williams Family Reunion last week. Ultimately, I decided to focus my attention on just a few areas rather than picking up small nuggets across numerous topics.
My focus for this 4 day educational event was:
- Building and marketing to my database more effectively
- Using social media effectively
- How to build my profit share tree
I took a couple of classes which focused on Facebook, and picked up some great tips for using Facebook to for business marketing or networking.
Top 10 Facebook Tips to Improve your Business:
- People will talk to you on Facebook who won’t talk to you on the phone. Reach out to people you want to be in business with, or people you would want to hire you, and connect with them.
- Rather than congratulating someone on Facebook in a private message or posting something publicly about them on your profile, post it their wall. All of their contacts will see your comments, and may just decide to check out who you are.
- 80-20 Rule: The class I took suggested 80% of your posts on your Facebook profile should be about business with 20% personal posts. I think you could also take the opposite approach – post personal comments 80% of the time and throw in a little business 20% of the time. Either way, make sure everyone gets a chance to know what business you are in, and also gets a peak and who you are in real life.
- Don’t simply repeat your Twitter posts on Facebook. People who follow you in both places may be your biggest advocates, and they will get bored quickly if you don’t provide unique content on each site.
- Use Facebook Lists and limit who sees what. I knew that you could create lists to make it easier to organize my friends for reading their updates, but didn’t realize that I could post status updates to just one list. To post to just one list when writing a status update, click on the lock icon next to the ‘Share’ button. Then choose Customize, then Specific People. At this point, you can type in a group or list, and you can also exclude a specific person (which would be perfect if you were planning a surprise for someone in the group).
- Drip links from a great newsletter to Facebook. If you get a great newsletter with information that you could share about your industry, drip the links from the newsletter one per day. You won’t overwhelm your connections and you’ll look like the most well read person around.
- Modify your Facebook settings. Go into your privacy settings and change the search option to ‘everyone’ (the default is just your network). Then scroll to the bottom of the profile, click on Edit Options and change your limit to 5000 friends (the default is that Facebook chooses which 250 of your friends it posts updates on your wall).
- Join Facebook networks. If you join networks (school, city, organizations), then your posts will display on anyone’s news feed who is also in the network.
- Find friends easily by searching on their email address. The easiest way to gather up a bunch of email addresses is to start a new email, and add all the addresses to the To: field. But instead of sending the email, simply copy the emails to your clipboard (Control C) and then paste them in the Search box at the very bottom of the Facebook page. Then choose ‘Find People’.
- Hide annoying apps and annoying people. If you move your cursor to the upper right corner of a status update, an invisible ‘Hide’ button will appear. You can choose to hide the application (such as Mafia Wars or Farmville), or you can hide the person. Hiding apps allows you to clean up your news feed, eliminating the silly games you don’t like without having to unfriend the people who play the games. Hiding people allows you to keep a business contact as a friend, but you won’t have to look at their posts. Keep in mind that if you are one of the people who plays a lot of apps (that most of us find annoying), many people may just unfriend or hide you if they don’t realize they can hide just the apps. If you want to play the games, create a list of just the other people who play the games, and only send those updates to your games group (see #5).
