“Let us not play childish games. Again, who sent you?” Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of FaceBook, said. The words that came from his mouth sounded so finesse his hoodie shirt ruined an almost king-like question, more so his blue jeans and white sneakers.
“Your mom. She said you’re such a bad bad boy.” Agent Leopard said.
The young CEO gave an exasperated nod at his personal bodyguard by the captive’s side. Clearly, the interrogation won’t go smoothly as he had hoped for. This was exactly the way he felt during a meeting where he was convincing a group of big-shot advertisers FaceBook ads do work.
“Who taught you to punch? Sister Serefina?” Agent Leopard said, chuckling with bloodshot eyes. He could act unaffected by the constant beating he gets with every cheeky comment his tongue makes, but soreness had altered his face reminiscent of the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The bodyguard made a jab again. Agent Leopard spat blood on the floor.
“Unfortunately, I can’t kill you yet.” Zuckerberg said, rising from where he sat, putting on his famous hoodie. “When I get back I hope you’ll be more communicative. Jose, give him the Tickler, but don’t overdo it.”
“No. Not the Tickler.” Agent Leopard said. For the first time, there was fear in his voice.
The Tickler was a gadget that looked like an average swivel chair, but with a push of a button, it will sprout mechanical hands and tickle the victim until he succumbs to whatever bidding the controller wants – or die laughing.
Dawn was approaching when Zuckereberg closed the door, shutting out the laughter that was starting to fill the warehouse.
OK. That was the end of worst-case scenario 1. Stay tuned for the scenario 2 in which Zuckerberg brought a companion, Hulk Hogan if you must, to interrogate yours truly for divulging the secret to infiltrating any FaceBook circle (No, it’s different from Google+) and turn them to lucrative deals for you or your clients.
The key to a successful FaceBook campaign is to keep everything personal. Appear genuine. Act like you’re sharing these client links to real friends and that you really think the links are awesome (even when they’re not). Exaggerate yet keep comments simple. Personalize the way you share links. (For future reference, never say “cool link!” or “check this link out”).
Don’t post your client links on the first week yet. You don’t want to overwhelm your friends with marketing goals. Give them something valuable first, like quotes (choose the uplifting ones), pretty things, news, and cool contents (Digg and StumbleUpon have them!). So when you start posting client links, your friends won’t realize you’re sharing links for marketing gains because you’ve shared nothing but the best, useful, and entertaining to them last week.
Your first week shares should carry these combinations:
(Note: The suggested number of healthy posting per day is 3)
Combo 1
Quotes + Random Facts + A picture of something cute (see below)
News link + Useful tip to whatever universal + Interesting new recipe
Combo 3:
A Joke + A celebrity news or scandal + Update on iPhone 5
These shares are universal, so they shouldn’t have hard time appealing to your friends. When you’re ready to post client links in your 2nd week, simply substitute one of the three entries per combinations:
Quotes + CLIENT LINK + picture of something cute.
Use your best judgment to what client link fits best in the combination.
Road Block
As FaceBook limits the number of friends you can add per day, building the healthy number of list may take weeks or months, but that’s OK.
Gains
Apart from the traffic, you can now market different client URLs without risking their official FaceBook page. Opportunity of the content or the site going viral is at hand’s reach!
What You Need
A complete, clean, and picture perfect profile. Create this from a female’s perspective because girls have multi-market appeal. For manly products like army shirts or Transformers collectibles, of course, you’d want to be a man to appeal to the male crowd. Additionally, you’d want to target the all important 18-49 demo.
How to Get Started
All of these strategies will be worthless if you do not have a friend list.
Start with a group search in FaceBook. If you have a cooking blog, “Like” Kraft or The Master Chef FaceBook page to meet fellow food lovers. From there, grow your list exponentially. Target around 70 FaceBook friends on your first week. Proceed to McDonalds, Starbucks, or Subway and hunt people as though you've got a go signal from the Fed to star in your very own Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And so forth.
Also, send some greetings or a thank-you-note from people who accepted your request.
Some Important Notes
Change your profile pic every week. People these days are so wary of marketers (* spammers) a stagnant profile pic is the weakest link.
If you receive a notification from FaceBook that you cannot add a friend for a week (because you’ve added people you don’t know; well, duh!), proceed to posting valuable posts from the combo, or, you could improve your profile. Make it appear genuine, OK?
As long as you provide value, people wouldn't care if you're a marketer or not. In fact, they'd rather befriend a marketer who's SO cool his posts are so interesting and are up to date than real FaceBook friends who spent all day trashing about what they don't like about other people or how cute their smelly pets are. Ugh.