Do You Invite Your Email Marketing List To Your Facebook Party?

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Ever thought of  inviting your email marketing list to your Facebook party? Here’s why I believe it’s a great idea and how you can do this easily.

I’ve always liked the party analogy to describe social media sites like Facebook. Done the right way, the idea is much like ‘working the room’ at a party.

In other words, you mingle, make contact and network with others so you get to know more about each other.

Then when you strike up a meaningful connection that you want to take further, you might invite them back to your private house party or you might like to think of it as a private party room of you own adjoining the main room.

This is where you and they can find out even more about each other and you can demonstrate more fully the value you can offer them.

For me this is happens to be my blog but for others it might be some other kind of site.

The next step is for those visiting your blog to opt in to your email marketing list so that you can develop the relationship further.

What About Your Email Marketing List Subscribers Who Arrive Independently of the Main Party?

These are the people who may have come to your blog via a search engine, personal recommendation, via other blogs and sites etc

If they subscribe to your email marketing list then you can assume they are reasonably serious about wanting to have more contact with you, so do you then invite them back to the main party, being Facebook? This is pretty much working in reverse order.

Why You MUST Invite Your Email Marketing List to be Your Friend on Facebook

Firstly it just makes more sense to invite people to be wherever you are so that they can continually be exposed to who you are and what you’re all about. Branding, branding, branding!

Secondly no matter what kind of business you’re in, there’s no beating the personal touch when it comes to ‘customer service’.

Once you’re connected on Facebook you are then perfectly positioned to make more personal contact with them.

This you might do via sending them private messages, leaving messages on their wall and chatting to them using the Facebook chat feature.

As you build these relationships, so trust is developed and by the time you might speak to them on the phone or using Skype it will be far more comfortable for both of you, since you will feel as if you already know each other.

Thirdly when you have the email address of someone you request to be your friend and which you will have if they are on your list, Facebook doesn’t send you that horrible message asking whether you really do know the person you’re inviting. They accept that if you have someone’s email address then you must know them. So it’s an easy way to add razor targeted friends to your Facebook account.

The Easiest way to Invite Your Email Marketing List to be Your Friend on Facebook

If you’re still in the early stages of growing your list then you’re probably doing it fairly slowly albeit consistently.

Most AutoResponder suppliers will give you an option to download a contact file of your email marketing list subscribers according to a date range.

If you have never invited any of your list to be your friend on Facebook then you can download your entire list although I don’t recommend that you invite all 3000 + subscribers to be your friends in one go.

You would be better off breaking your full list into smaller contact files which you can then process over the period of a few days or weeks, depending on how large your list is.

What you want to do is establish a routine whereby you download this file at the end of every week so that you have a file of all your new email marketing list subscribers for that week.

Once you have saved this file or files to your computer go to your Facebook page, click on Friends > Find Friends > Other Tools and the following will appear.

Now simply upload the contact file from your computer and follow the prompts to invite your email marketing list subscribers to be your friends.

I keep all my friends organised using Facebook lists so I have one called ‘email marketing list subscribers’ which means I can easily locate these contacts when I want to do so.

This is a fantastic way to further develop relationships with your list but remember once they are your friends on Facebook YOU must take the lead in nurturing these relationships.

Over to you now… Do you already do this?  How well does it work for you? If you don’t yet do it, do you see value in doing it and if so when are you going to take action?

Have your say in the comments section and I’ll meet you there!

Lastly I’d love you to share this post with your followers because they might like to join in the discussion too. Thank you.

Be Happy!

Invitation Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kofoed/2225351769/