My fiance and I have had a little competition going for the last couple of months. Who can get to 1000 Facebook friends the fastest. (It's worth noting that both of us are a DISTANT second to her mother, who is approaching 2300 friends)
I'd very rarely gone out and tried to collect Facebook friends. If someone found me, and they want to 'friend' me, great, I'd certainly let them in to my world. All of the people whom I have personal relationships with, I have long since tracked down if they have a Facebook profile. You know, the people I went to school with, my friends, friends of my friends with whom I've had personal connections........
.......and then Christa started to race past me.
Every time I would look at her profile, she had leaped over me. I get plenty of requests in a given week. Having icons on my posts to connect with me makes it easy for my ActiveRain friends to find me. However, I'm not very good at going into Facebook and checking who is waiting for me to accept their request. So sometimes, those would build up. Watching her pass me up would prompt me to go in and accept requests. I'd track her down.....and a few days later, she'd race past me again.
This has been going on for about the last two months.
Until I found my secret weapon yesterday, and I'd like to share it with you!
How many of you have a database? Do you have past clients email addresses in the database? We have a database of all the past attendees of RainCamp. I hadn't really gotten around to playing with it until a few days ago as we were looking at how to more effectively market RainCamps using Facebook. So, I had all these email addresses of the people that had previously attended RainCamp and I needed a way to connect with them on Facebook.
Eventbrite (the ticket provider we use when people sign up for RainCamp) allows you to export reports to excel or numbers (I'm a MAC user, so it was numbers for me). From there, I created a csv file (comma separated value) using just the column for email addresses. It's really easy and I bet if you have a database, you can figure out how to create a report out of the email address field and get it in csv file format.
From there, I went to Facebook and clicked on my friends icon in the top right and then click the 'find friends' option
Next you find the 'Upload Contact File' option
From there it's simple. Hit browse, then browse your computer to find the CSV file you created with your email address. Once you upload that file, Facebook will automatically determine: how many of your email addresses are attached to a facebook profile. It will pull out the ones you are already friends with. Then it will give you a list of everyone left that was in your email list, that you are not currently friends with. There is then a 'select all' option and with one or two more clicks, you can invite all those people to be your friend.
There is one additional step you can also take. If the people on your list are not on Facebook, Facebook will send them an invite from you to join Facebook.
Was this a little bit impersonal for me? Yeah, just a tad for my taste, since it didn't give me a chance to write a note to the group before I invited them. That was alright though, hopefully your past clients or your sphere will know who you are and not ask "why did you friend me again?". I got a few of those when inviting past attendees of RainCamp. What could I expect right? It had been a few months. I should have done it much sooner. Others were really happy I found them. I left a few notes on the walls of the people I have a closer relationship with as they accepted my friend requests and hope to have more interactions with those I didn't get a chance to connect with in a more personal way. Many of the people did remember me and we had a chance to connect. I hope to share lots of good stuff with them in the coming months and years and no doubt will learn a lot about them as well.
So there you go, an easy way to connect with quite a few people at once using your database.........you do have one of those right??? You are friends on Facebook with your past clients, right? What better way to keep up on what's going on in their lives and stay connected?
(and of course, this little trick allowed me to bound over 1000 friends and win the race with Christa........but I'm still pathetically traiing Missy......and, I only offended one guy along the way that didn't find it amusing at all that our 'friendship' came together under the pretense of me racing my Fiance. To you my friend, there never should have been a race had I known about this trick five months ago when we started RainCamp, so I'm sorry :-) )
To all my new Facebook Friends from RainCamp, sorry it took me so long to track you down!!
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