Stop the Facebook Spam!
A lot of Facebook groups related to making money, affiliate marketing, network building, etc have been popping up lately, and judging by the number of group invitations I get, every time someone creates a new group they go through the member list of every other group and invite every single person they see. Facebook is a great tool for networking as well as keeping in touch with people, but it’s getting harder and harder to filter through all the bullshit. Every other Facebook group looks like a copy and paste of a poorly written landing page offering something like “join my group and I’ll teach you how to make $100k a month!” Hopefully no one here has been sucked into any of these ridiculous scams.
Facebook groups are actually a very good way to build a network because people are a lot more prone to accept a group invitation than they are to join a mailing list, and groups work in essentially the same way as lists because they give you the ability to post updates and message all of the members whenever you want. If anyone here has or is planning on starting a Facebook group (I’m talking about something for the purposes of networking or making money, not a “class of 08 rocks!” group), here’s a couple tips for maximizing your ROI:
- Don’t send millions of messages a day. I joined about 15 groups and left all but 3 of them because a lot of them were sending out multiple messages every single day, and they were all spam messages reiterating the same information and sending me to poorly designed landing pages for shitty products. Send mass messages 2 or 3 times a week at the most, or people will get fed up with them and leave, and you’ve just turned away a potential lead. If you have small updates you’d like to share, just update your page to add the new information, and save the mass messaging for really important news.
- Make it believable. I’ve talked about this before and now I’m talking about it again. If you want people to believe you actually know what you’re talking about, you need to show some credentials. A good example of what NOT to do is 100k Dream Team. I saw someone advertising this on Facebook and since the girl posting it looked pretty hot, I clicked it to see what it was, and I was greeted with the most ridiculous bullshit I’d ever seen in my life. She makes $100k a month, yet for some reason she decided not to hire a professional designer and instead to design the entire site herself in Microsoft Paint. And I’m sure that yellow Lambo actually belongs to her and she didn’t just steal the picture from Google Images. Let’s be serious - if you want people to believe you’re making money, at least make yourself reasonably believable.
- Don’t steal. At least half of the groups that I left due to spam messaging were actually copying each other’s messages and sending them to their own groups. I received the exact same message multiple times, just from different people. Even if I were interested in their bullshit, there would have been no point staying in more than one of the groups if they’re just going to repeat the same information. That’s another problem I see with a lot of these “make money online” blogs - all their topics have already been discussed hundreds of times and they don’t have any fresh info or even an original take on old info. Come on now.
Another thing you need to know is that the Facebook crowd is actually generally a lot smarter than your typical audience. This means that it’s a lot harder to rip them off and you’ll actually need to be smart with your marketing and develop some quality strategies rather than just spamming. A lot of what works on PPC networks and forums will not work on Facebook, so my advice would be to sign up, get familiar with how it works and who uses it, check out some of the groups and see which ones are successful and what they do (what their pages look like, how often they send messages, how they write their messages, their group image, etc) and then go from there.
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Hey Stak, Good article on FaceBook hate to admit this but I really thought FaceBook was a highschool type thingy. I guess I’m just not up on some of these internet things. But now I will check out FaceBook and see what it’s all about. Thanks for the info and now I will know what to stay away from ,what to do, and what not to do. You really don’t think that “pretty hot” girl owned that “Lambo”? Oh come on now, she might lol…. It’s alittle disheartening when you do see ads that tell you or people tell you how to make $100k in a month.Pleeeease!
I’ve had some similar experiences with Facebook. I belong to a few groups that send out mail daily and I’ve started leaving many of them because very few of them have any value. Another problem I’ve been finding is that I get a number of friend requests every day from folks I don’t know. A few of them will include a brief message as to who they are, but many of them just seem to go through groups or their friend’s friend lists and add everyone there.
But the worst thing are people that add hundreds of applications to their profiles and then application spam their friend lists. I’ve started removing freinds for this very reason.
Great post,
James
blog.jvf.com
That’s the main reason I gave up reading half of them. There are too many exotic car headers and too many feed scrapers going around!
I think It’s getting wilder after john chow posting about Brian Campbell and his quest to make $10,000 in 37 days from Facebook.
I joined Brian Campbell’s group when it first started and left after a few days, there was so much spam it was ridiculous. His videos sucked too, I’d be surprised if he even made the $10,000 and he didn’t just make up the entire thing and work out a deal with John as a publicity stunt for his blog.