The very lifeblood of the social network (SN) are the contacts you acquire. Today’s post will go over how to decide on a demographic (demo) and how to use your demo to find quality contacts to make up your network.
Social Networks Need Contacts
Whether you’re selling a service like tarot card readings or a product like the blend-o-matic 5000 one thing will remain the same: your offerings will appeal to a specific group of people called a “demo”. A demo has 6 main categories
geographic location
Age
Sex
income
marital status
education
The above 6 are listed in descending order of importance. However, the order may change depending on the service or product your offering.
Geographic location is important if you are marketing a service or product only to your immediate area. A blend-o-matic 5000 can be shipped to anywhere in the world, but tarot are typically read in person. So you need to align the importance of the categories in your demo with your own business model.
Determining your demo will require a bit of logic and some investigating. Luckily there are people out there who are willing to help. Simply putting a call in to a sales rep at a local television provider (comcast, optimum, qwest, CBS, FOX, etc…) can be your first step in getting your numbers down. When we refer to a “sales rep” we mean the person who handles selling media, ie broadcast time. Putting in a simple google search for comcast advertising returns the contact for their media sales dept as the first listing. Just call them and let them know that you are trying to come up with a demo for your product/service. Describe to them what you do/sell and they should be able to come up with a snapshot of a typical buyer for that product/service.
When you have your demo, log into the accounts you’ve set up and start searching. On twitter you’ll find contacts by clicking on “Find People”. When using “Find People” you’ll enter something about your target audience that they would be likely to put in their profile. You see twitter, gives you results based on user name and keywords entered in a profile. When people build their profile, they include their interests and so forth. So if you’re building your SN to market your blend-o-matic 5000, you might search for people with “running” or “biking” or “health nut” in their names and profiles. Searching for “health nut” returned 10 results for me. So be creative and know your consumer! That’s how you’ll find the perfect audience.
Myspace has different search interface than twitter. On MySpace, you’ll click “browse people” (located in the top navigation bar) and then click “advanced”. Then you simply enter the criteria you’re looking for (this is where knowing your demo will be handy!), click update and look at all the profiles your search returns. Then you scroll your mouse over each name and click “add to friends” (you’ll have to hold your mouse over a name for just a moment for the “add to friends” option to appear). Sometimes you’ll have to enter a “captcha” (a spam and bot filter) and sometimes you won’t. But maybe one of the EASIEST ways to find THOUSANDS of good contacts on myspace is to do a search for a big company’s page and start to hijack their friends! So the guy selling the blend-o-matic 5000 might look for some uber popular health guru’s page. For example at the time of this writing, Richard Simmons has 1,312 friends (you can generally see a user’s friends by scrolling down their profile just a bit. It will generally be toward the right of the page). And you can bet your buns that many of those friends are people trying to slim down or generally healthy folks already. These people probably own a blender and either are, or will be in the market for a new one. Next you’d click, “view all friends” and begin to harvest them one at a time. The best method for doing this is as follows – when you’re on the page to “view all friends” you’ll notice the alphabet is written across the top of the box containing a user’s friends. You’d start by clicking on the pound sign (#). This will separate the user’s friends, displaying only friends who have numbers or symbols in their username first. After requesting to add all friends under the # filter, click on “A” and you can request friendship from everyone who’s name starts with an “A”. Then “B”, “C”, etc… until you’ve requested friendship from everyone in that users friend list. (you are free to omit friend requests from celebrities if you want to. I generally don’t omit them. Any contact is a good contact.)
The strategies are similar on facebook, however, there is no “advanced search” function as on myspace. So what you’ll do (again) is look for a popular profile and begin harvesting contacts. On facebook, Richard Simmons has over 7,000 fans and friends. So begin by searching for him via the search field in the navigation bar. When his pages come up click on the number of fans he has. The first listing for Richard Simmons says “4,407 fans”. Click that and a window will appear listing all friends of Richard Simmons. Next, you’ll simply click “Add as Friend” on the top contact. A new box will open asking “Add this contact as a friend?” you’ll click “Send Request” and then a Security Check box will appear. This next step will separate the SNing winners from the losers. Instead of entering the captcha phrase, click “Verify your Account”. Yet another box will open. You’ll need a cell phone handy to verify your account. Simply enter your CELL phone number and click confirm. A text message will be sent to your phone (standard texting rates apply). Enter the code that was sent to your phone in the field marked “Code:” and click confirm. WHALA! You’re now ready to add friends without wasting time filling out captchas. Now get to work adding contacts.
With Myspace and Facebook, not everyone will not accept your requests friendship. Don’t let that get you down. Simply keep going! Request to add people everyday to continue growing your SN.
Make sure to make sporadic status updates via the “what’s on your mind” field on facebook, the “what are you doing” field on twitter, and the “what are you doing now?” field on myspace. Need help coming up with good content? Read our last article of this 3 part series “Social Networks Need Content”
Read our next article: “Social Networks Need Consistency” Monday Sept 28th @ 9:00AM
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