From its humble beginnings as a social website for Harvard students, Facebook has transformed from a simple socialization tool, to a massively indispensable platform for millions of businesses. Done well, business people can tap into their local community’s full potential and gain the most favorable results. Sharing the secrets of how to utilize Facebook as a major tool, is marketing pro, David Frey. Together, Curtis Lewsey and David dissect nine essential strategies that will yield the best outcome when advertising on Facebook, outline the four rules of posting content, and list twenty unique ideas for creating engaging content. David also emphasizes the one thing every marketer must integrate into their Facebook strategies: providing the feeling of likeability and trust.
—
Listen to the podcast here:
David Frey: How Facebook Marketing Can Boost Your Local Reach And Community
I am thrilled and honored to be able to have Mr. David Frey, who has been a mentor for me for over a decade. I would have to say that there are coaches and there are coaches of the coaches, there are mentors and there are mentors to the mentors. He’s definitely one for me. He had shared some life-changing information over lunch and breakfast over the years, seeing him at different events. I want to say thank you for being a friend, always opening up and asking the tough questions, as well as always openly sharing your wisdom. I want to thank you so much for that.
He wants to bring the absolute most value in the shortest period of time so we are going to get right down to business. The title of this is How to Generate a Never-Ending Stream of Local Customers and Referrals Using Facebook Even If You’re Dead Broke and Starting From Scratch. Mr. David Frey, if you don’t mind sharing a background of you because referrals is your language. I’d love for you to share a brief background and we’ll dive right into it.
Curtis, thanks for having me. My name is David Frey and back in around 2002, I published a book called The Small Business Marketing Bible. It then quickly became the number one bestselling marketing book on the internet for small businesses. I came out with a product called Instant Referral Systems, which for many years was the number one selling product on the internet, teaching people a lot of different strategies for getting referrals for the local businesses.
I started a company that went around the nation, doing seminars on how to generate more referrals for all different types of businesses, but that was a different day and time. Facebook wasn’t even available back then. Now, Facebook is available and it has become the number one referral-generating platform tool on the face of the earth. There are a lot of referrals passed in referral groups and from mouth to mouth, but the vast majority of referrals that are being passed on now are being passed on through Facebook. We’re going to talk about that.
You say that there are three things to generate consistent, high-quality referrals. What are the three top things that you can share?
Number one, you need to build a large network of local people that know, like and trust you. A large network on Facebook of local people. There’s a big difference there because I’ll bet on your Facebook profile, you are friends with a lot of people who are not living in your local area. You need to build a large network of people that live right down in your city or your farming area and provide them with content to get them to know, like and trust you.
The number two thing is to make sure that people know what you do and how well you do it. Here’s a very strange phenomenon that I’ve seen on Facebook. People don’t even need to know if you’re good or not. If they know, like and trust you, and they know what you do, you’re going to be the person that they refer. I know you’re saying in your brain, “I wouldn’t refer someone that I didn’t think was awesome.” The fact is online, the people who get referred the most are the people that have a wide network of people that know and trust them, and know what they do. The last one is to continue to stay on the top of their mind. You can do that on Facebook. We’re going to talk all about that in this episode.
Why did you say on Facebook and not only in person?
Because 7 out of 10 people in the United States and probably in your local area are on Facebook. Not all of them are active but they are on Facebook. Let me give you an example. I live in a little city called Friendswood, Texas. There is a Facebook group called Friendswood Moms and Dads. Here in my local town, there are about 28,000 people. In this Facebook group, there are 6,000 residents that live right here in Friendswood. That’s 21% of all the local adult residents that are in this Facebook group. Most of them are active or they would never have joined a Facebook group. Usually, somebody who’s not active on Facebook doesn’t post and certainly doesn’t join a group. That goes to show you that there are a lot of your local people right here on Facebook talking every day.
Isn’t Facebook more or less on the impersonal side? What you shared right there seemed very personal.
When you know somebody face to face, that is going to be a much deeper relationship and that’s the goal. On Facebook, you can build a much wider audience of people that know, like and trust you that have never even had a very personal encounter with you. On Facebook, the benefit is that you can create a large network of people that know who you are versus offline. You can only go to lunch with many people a day.
In Facebook, it’s got to be confusing when you’re going about starting a business because there are Facebook pages, Facebook groups, and there’s your personal profile. Do you mind sharing, as it comes to a referral strategy, what to use and the mindset behind it?
You’ve got Facebook pages which are different than Facebook groups, and then you have your personal profile. What I’m suggesting is you use your personal profile and let me tell you why. Unless you’re advertising on your Facebook page, it will get almost no reach. In other words, you can post some and hardly anybody will ever see it. That’s the way Facebook pages have matured. If you want to get any reach on your Facebook page, you have to run ads. The reason that I would never use a Facebook group for becoming a celebrity locally is because you want to promote your business. In local Facebook groups, there’s this culture of it’s not good to promote your local business. That’s pretty much true in all Facebook groups. There are a lot of rules that say, “Don’t talk about your business in Facebook groups,” but it’s even hyper or more in a local community.
Facebook has a rule that you cannot use your personal profile for your business. That is true, but what they’re talking about are people who are constantly posting stuff with no value. They are advertising their business or product and putting links everywhere. That type of Facebook profile is going to be eventually banned. I’m not talking about that or whatsoever. We’re going to provide a ton of value on our Facebook profile. We’re also going to sprinkle in some promotional posts of our own. Number one, your personal profile is going to get way more reach than a business page. Your personal profile is more personal. When someone comes to your personal profile, they’re expecting that it is you and not your business. The only drawback on your personal profile is you cannot advertise. In the early days of Facebook, you could. You cannot anymore. If you want to take this strategy to the next level, you can do it on a Facebook page, but know that you’re going to need to advertise.
The Small Business Marketing Bible
When you say advertise, so I have a Facebook page advertised. There’s boosting and running. I know that’s a whole other course and conversation in another day. Do you mind summarizing that for people? There are also people who have built careers out of helping people do this.
Everything you’re going to learn now, all the different types of content posts you’re going to learn, you can put $10 to that post and advertise or boost it to your local area that you’re marketing to. You’re going to get way more reach, but there’s always going to be that little thing that’s going to say promotion. They know it’s an advertisement and it’s not a personal thing, which detracts a little bit from the authenticity of your posts. At the same time, if you have the money, then it might be a smart thing to do all this on your Facebook page, and put money toward boosting that post into your local area so that a larger portion of people see it.
I’ve done something where I’ve seen people and I see what other people are doing. It will say, “The link is in the comments.” Does Facebook now recognize what you’re writing and not show that post? Are they getting smarter on that? I did that because I’m trying to get around that whole thing. I put in a link and there was no engagement.
It’s because on your personal profile, they don’t want you to be promoting stuff. When they see a link in your personal profile, it means that you’re promoting something. You’re sending people somewhere. They ratchet back your reach. It will reach less people if you have a link in your post on your personal profile. One way to get around that is in your comments. I don’t know if Facebook has caught on to that yet. They might have, but that’s the idea.
Last question before we get into the nine steps because I want to get into the nine steps for sure. When you teach or you’re mentoring somebody, do you tell people certain blend? I follow you and I see you have a blend of all kinds of stuff. It’s your kids, your family, what you’re passionate about, and you drip in some business. Do you have a certain formula?
I would say there’s a 1 to 10 ratio. For every ten content or lifestyle posts that you post, one of those can be promotional. When I say promotional, I don’t mean a total direct ad. We’re going to talk about that. I’ll explain what a promotional post is as we go on. I think a good ratio is about 1 to 10. You do nine content posts, and then the tenth one is a promotional post for your business.
I want to dive into these nine steps. The first step and the most important part is creating a special offer.
When you see somebody on Facebook and see a post that’s interesting, one of the first things you do is click into that person’s profile, and look to see who they are. That’s what people do. All humans are natural voyeurs. If that wasn’t true, there wouldn’t be a lot of reality shows. The explosion of reality shows proves the fact that we are natural voyeurs. We want to look into people’s lives. The most important and viewed webpage on any website is the about page because everybody wants to know who is the person behind this. This is a key. When they click on your name and they go to your personal profile, they look at your header and they start looking around. That is where you can present to them an offer.
The reason we’re doing this is because you cannot market to somebody that you cannot reach. What do I mean by that? If you don’t have an email address of somebody, how are you going to contact them? If you don’t have a cell phone number, how are you going to text them? The only other way to do that is to run an ad. We call it spraying and praying. It’s running an ad to everybody, but that’s super expensive. What you want to do is create an offer that will get people to request whatever that offer is. Now, you can capture their information.
Let me give you some examples. If you’re a realtor, you can offer a home valuation or a home fix-up checklist. You might offer a brochure called Home Selling Secrets or The Home Fix Up Rolodex. It’s a rolodex of service providers in your local area that do certain things that will help you to fix up your home. Something that people would want if they were interested in your type of profession. If they’re the least bit interested about their home, selling their home or buying a home, they would find that the home fix-up checklist would be a valuable thing. That is how you capture their lead. If you’re a restaurant, you could give away a free lunch, a free dinner, a free dessert, a dinner movie getaway or something like that. If you’re a plumber, you can offer different information on how to unclog the drains in your home or if your toilet floods. That is an offer. You need to create some type of offer that you can offer on your personal profile that people would want to access.
That’s powerful. I’ve referred our air conditioning guy many times because he taught my wife and I how to eliminate 75% of the visits from air conditioning guys who come to your house. He walked us through and he’s like, “I’m not in the business of tinkering. When your coils need to be cleaned, I’ll clean them. I’ll come and that’s a bigger ticket, when it needs to be replaced. I would love your friends and your family’s business.” When he prepped and said this stuff, it saved us so much money. The questions that people are asking you all the time and come up with a little checklist like that and give it as a value proposition like, “I’m just adding value and giving it to you.” David, you’re always doing that stuff. You’re always adding value. Anytime that you buy something, a little technical or this, “By the way, this is a great deal on it.” If I click that link and buy it, do you get paid with Amazon or no? I hope you do.
On my personal profile, I won’t do that.
I bought many things. You’re always adding value and I can’t tell you how many things I’ve bought because you recommend it.
The key is that you’re capturing their contact information. Imagine for a moment you had an email list of 1,000 people who live right in your local area and you’re a plumber.
Facebook Marketing: Create some type of offer on your personal profile that people would want to access.
Let’s talk about that. You need a landing page. Tell me, what do we do?
We need three things. We need the offer. We need some place to send them to get the offer. We call those landing pages. They’re a webpage on the internet and there are a lot of different tools that you can use to create a landing page. You can use a tool like ClickFunnels. You can use a tool like Unbounce. You can go to Wix.com and create a one-page landing page. There are a lot of different ways you can create a landing page. All the landing page is doing this one thing. That’s offering or showing that offer and getting people to request that offer. The second thing you need is an autoresponder. An autoresponder is an email sending service. AWeber, GetResponse, MailChimp, Constant Contact, 1ShoppingCart, Office Autopilot and all those services offer email autoresponders. I use ActiveCampaign and GetResponse for two different reasons. That is going to allow you to send newsletters to people in your local area whose email you capture through the landing page that is showing the offer. I hope that makes sense.
Step number two is the landing page, step number three is the autoresponder. What do you use?
I use GetResponse and ActiveCampaign. AWeber is a good one. ConvertKit is another one. There are a lot of them.
Give us an example. In your Facebook About page, you might have a special offer where somebody can download something. If they click a link, it goes to a landing page. They put their information in, and then what will the autoresponder do? Tell us a little bit about the process.
The autoresponder will manage those emails so that when you want to send out a message to all those people, you go into the autoresponder, write a message, push a button, and it will send it to all those people. The other thing it does is, what if you wrote a tip a day and you created an email message about that tip? An autoresponder will allow you to set up an autoresponder list. It sets up these messages that go out sequentially automatically to people. Let’s say every day for the 30 days you write a tip and you put it in the autoresponder. That’s 30 days’ worth of tips that when somebody joins or requests your offer, they will automatically get those 30 tips fully automated without you even touching it.
Step number four, you talked about creating another personal Facebook page. Why is that?
A lot of people have their personal family members on their Facebook page. They have a lot of other people. What you want to do is max out your 5,000 friends with local people. Facebook allows you 5,000 friends. It does allow you to go over that, but the connection isn’t as close as a friend. They call those followers. If someone does a friend request to me and I don’t accept the friend request, they automatically become a follower. Every now and then, Facebook might show them a post from me. If the post goes very popular, then Facebook will go into the follower list and show the followers. I hope that makes sense and maybe this is the next question. I don’t want to go into this too deep.
You mentioned that step number five is adding local friends.
Before I talk about adding local friends, I want to talk a little bit more about your Facebook profile. There’s a cover photo for your Facebook profile. This is where you can show your offer. Do you want me to give an example?
That would be amazing if you could do that. That would be fantastic.
I want you to see the cover of what your personal Facebook profile would look like with an offer on it. An example is a realtor who has changed their Facebook profile cover photo to show them and the offer. The offer is, “Want to know what your Friendswood home is really worth? Go to FreeFriendswoodHomeValuation.com.” When you start making content posts and people that are in the local area come to your Facebook profile, the first thing you want them to see is your offer. That’s right up on the Facebook profile. This is their personal profile and Facebook does not have a problem with this as long as you’re doing a lot of content.
The second thing I want to show them is the About page. On your About page or details about you, this is where you want to write a message that captures their attention. I have eight different paragraphs on my About page. I talk about what I do because that’s one of the first things you want them to know. I talk about my family. I have a paragraph called, “Let’s be friends.” I said, “If you live in Friendswood, you have two feet, one nose, two ears and eleven fingers. The extra one is for nose picking.” I try and put a little bit of humor in it. I said, “Send me a friend request so we can get to know each other. I like making local friends.” You’re asking them to become your friend if you live locally.
I talk about where I live and I give my address. Who cares if they know where I live? We’re all local. I tell them to contact me. I even give them my cell phone number. If I was a realtor, I would talk about your home value because that is where I’d send them to the offer. I’ll read this to you. Let’s say you’re a realtor, “Your home value. If you want to know how much your home is worth (don’t believe those online services), even if you’re not planning on selling your home or just for sizzles and giggles, go to FreeFriendswoodHomeValuation.com.”
[bctt tweet=”If people know, like, and trust you, and know what you do, they will be referring you.” via=”no”]
I am sending them to my offer so I can capture their contact information. I then say, “Get the checklist.” I’ve got another landing page with a checklist on it. I promote that little checklist and that paragraph. I then say, “Welcome. I give you my humblest welcome to my Facebook home page. I post all kinds of cool stuff on here about Friendswood and other local things. If you live here in Friendswood, send me a friend request so that we can connect and thanks for reading down this far. You are a three-percenter. Ninety-seven percent of the people stopped reading after paragraph number one.” A little bit of humor. That’s what I would do for setting up my personal profile. That’s important because that’s how you are going to show them the offer and generate the lead.
There are many different possibilities there, not just in real estate. You pick one that’s visible and people that are out there all the time.
Let me show one more thing, Curtis. There is another section of your Facebook profile where you can actually put the links in to your offers. Here’s a good example. I stay with the real estate guy. Here’s all the links to LowerYourFriendswoodPropertyTax.com, FreeFriendswoodHomeSellingSecrets.com, FreeFriendswoodHomeFixUpRolodex.com, FreeFriendswoodHomeFixUpChecklists.com and FreeFriendswoodHomeValuation.com. Why do I put so many? It sounds like a lot of work. You do one every six months or whatever. The reason I do that is because they might be interested in one and not interested in the other. You want to give them many points of entry into your world.
Those URLs are fairly long. Is there a reason why you did that? Does that help with the search engines?
No, it’s because I’m sending them there via a link, it doesn’t matter how long they are. The thing is I put my city’s name into the URL. There’s something about that. When you’re looking for a yellow VW to buy, you’ve never seen a yellow VW, but the moment you said in your mind, “I want to buy a yellow VW,” you start seeing yellow VWs. That’s called your reticular activator. That happens when someone sees their hometown name where they live, it automatically draws their attention to that. I always put it in the link of the URL.
That has nothing to do with somebody going into Google and searching and trying to find that.
It might show up but that’s not the main reason.
Thank you for sharing those profiles. Anything that you want to share by all means, pull up a slide. That’s great. Let’s talk about adding local friends. What are some little secrets that you have for making that happen?
When you add your local friends, it’s good to try and add as many local friends as you can because they will be your base followers or your base group of friends. When they like your stuff, they have people that are attached to them in their local area. Other local people are going to see your stuff. You want to start out with all the people you know locally. How do you do that? I use this thing called The Memory Jogger. You can go onto Google and type in memory jogger and you’re going to get all kinds of memory joggers. They’re all over the place.
Memory jogger will ask you questions and help you to come up with names of people that you know. Who are your immediate family members that live locally? Who are your spouse’s relatives that live locally? Who’s your doctor that lives locally? Who’s your parents’ friends or your friends’ parents that live locally? Who is it that you went to school with locally? Who’s your local dentist? Who’s your local babysitter? Who’s the local person who cuts your hair? Who is your local kids’ teachers? Who are all the members of your local church that you attend? Who are your neighbors? Who sold your car? Who are the parents of your teammates? Who met you at a party? Who delivers your mail? Who works at the grocery store? On and on.
You don’t want to friend more than about 20 to 30 people a day. Facebook does not like that. I would probably keep it to about twenty people, but make a list of all these people. I would also send them a little message and say, “I’m starting a Facebook page and I wanted to send you a friend request so that we can be connected on Facebook.” That will increase your opportunity for doing that. I’m also going to talk about Dream 100 Influencers. Curtis, explain what the Dream 100 is.
The first time I ever heard about this was through Russell Brunson. However, I didn’t know it was a part of your inner circle or your inner marketing world. The way he explained it was make a list of all the people that are influencers in a specific niche that could potentially be referral business. Some people that have huge networks that you might want to tap into.
Let’s come up with a couple of names. Who would be the influential people locally that you want to be friends with on Facebook?
What business am I in? Is it real estate or it could be any business?
Think of any business. Who are the influential people in your local cities?
Facebook Marketing: Try and add as many local friends as you can because they will be your base followers or group of friends.
I know that there are some doctors or attorneys. There are also some accountants that I know that have big Rolodexes and book of businesses that could be a never-ending source of referrals for you. Maybe local business owners like a restaurant owner, that comes to mind. Even a hairdresser that is talking to people every day, all day. They could be a Dream 100 for me.
Pastors know a lot of people. Go into a local Facebook group and now, you have a lot of local people. I wouldn’t start friend requesting them right away. I might comment on one of their posts or something like that. They see my name somewhere before they see the friend request. This is not a race. This is not a 100-yard sprint. This is a marathon. You’re building a business in your local area for years so take it easy and do it the right way. Don’t be a spammer, but you want to start building a list of local people.
If I said twenty a day, that’s 600 a month, then I can hit my 5,000 in X amount of days. That’s the wrong mindset is what you’re saying. I think that’s very clever, comment and like a couple of posts here and there.
Remember, your best friends are the ones that sent a friend request to you who live locally. They’re incoming. They want to be your friend.
Once you’re starting to build this list, what do I post? What kind of content? That’s step number six.
Before I go into that, I want to start off by the two immortal rules of Facebook engagement. It’s timely because we are recording this on the day that America decides who will be the president of the United States. There have been a ton of political posts on Facebook here in the United States. They have gotten wickedly ugly. Rule number one, never post political stuff. Remember, you’re using this particular profile for your business. The moment you start posting political stuff and you’re a Republican, it turns away all the Democrats. The moment you start doing the opposite and you start promoting Democrats, all the Republicans are going to hate you. That’s the way our country is going. It’s divided down to two. If you’re Republican and I’m a Democrat, it automatically puts this barrier there that you unnecessarily have to overcome.
I’m also going to say to go light on the religious stuff. If religion is a part of your life and that’s how it is with me. My life revolves around my religious beliefs and my religion. I do post some religious stuff, but it isn’t every post. I spread them out. I sprinkle them out. I don’t make them heavy. On the other hand, if all you want to do is attract people from your religion, then go ahead and go heavy with it, but I don’t suggest that. Rule number two. This rule, a friend taught me years ago that has given me or brought me great peace of mind while I’ve been on Facebook.
I used to go around disagreeing with everybody because that is our natural human instinct. We are defensive by nature. Genetically speaking, we were born to disagree with people because that is our instinct. Never go over to someone else’s post and post a comment disagreeing with them. If you feel so strongly against what they’re saying, come over to your profile and post it. Remember, this is a business. You’re using this for a business. Don’t make enemies. We’re not in the business of making enemies. We’re in the business of making friends. Never disagree with people on their posts. Don’t do it. Keep scrolling. Those are the two immortal rules.
How do you build a following of local people that know, like and trust you? By creating super engaging local content. We’re going to go fast through this. I’m going to give you some rules, then we’re going to go through a lot of ideas. Four rules for posting content. Rule number one, post photos of your real life. Let them peek into your world. Let them get to know you as a real person. Post your family, yourself out of restaurants, your lifestyle. Rule number two, post local stuff, rarely national. Post funny, heartwarming, shocking and interesting values about your local city. Build a culture for your personal profile that when your friends want to know what’s going on locally, they go to your profile. That is your target market. That’s what this particular show is about.
I’m sure that Curtis does other episodes about how to get referrals from people who live on the other side of the world. This is specifically for people who live in your local area. Rule number three, sprinkle in indirect promotional business stuff. Again, ratio 1 to 10. Rule number four, limit your posts to no more than five per day. I think five per day is a lot. I post maybe three times a day and that’s enough. If you post so much, Facebook will put you in Facebook jail. I’ve seen it happen. Maybe about three posts a day is fine.
I am going to give you twenty unique ideas for creating and engaging local content. Idea number one, local feel-good stories. Bookmark local TV station websites, local newspaper websites, anywhere you can find local feel-good stories, and share those local feel-good stories. People who live locally will want to share the local stories. I promise you, they will become your most popular posts because you are sharing local things that have happened that are feel-good.
Number two, local news sports achievements. Get out of your house. Go out to the local football games. Here in Texas, football rules. Friday night lights is true. When you’re down here in Texas, the whole town goes out to the local high school football games. Take a nice camera out there and start shooting some photos, or go to the local newspaper website and take a screenshot of who won last night. Start a conversation about the football team. People will like to interact with local news sports achievements.
Number three, local historical photos. I’m showing an actual photo of my dad’s gas station in 1972 in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I was in a local Facebook group and someone posted this photo. I’m like, “That’s my dad’s gas station. I grew up in that gas station. Since I was eight years old, I was pumping gas in that gas station.” I go back to that Facebook group all the time. Go and find local historical photos. You can do that right down at the public library. There are books that are probably published where you can find local photos. Go to other Facebook groups for your local town that might show local photos.
[bctt tweet=”All humans are natural voyeurs. If that wasn’t true, there wouldn’t be a lot of reality shows.” via=”no”]
Number four, photos of local events. Go to a lot of local events and start taking photos. I have a picture of me on Veterans Day. Every year they have it down at the park. They ask all the veterans to come up and I’m in that picture. If you post that locally on your personal profile, especially a photo like that where it’s showing a lot of veterans, that’s going to go viral. Funny local signs go viral a lot. Go around your local city and you will find some places that have these signs out front that post funny things.
I’m looking at a sign that says, “The first five days after the weekend are the hardest.” In other words, the whole week. Monday through Friday sucks, but the weekends are awesome. That’s funny and you tell people where you took the photo at. They go, “I passed by that too and that is so funny.” You can go online. There are places online that you can go to where you can type in a message onto a sign and it will show up exactly as though it looks like it’s on a real sign in your local area. You can post that.
Number six, reviews of books and websites about your local city. There are undoubtedly books that were published about your local city. Go into your local library or to Amazon and find them, order them, take a photo of that, and post that on Facebook. Local historical facts and stories. These are good. You’re going to find these somewhere at the local library or maybe down at your local courthouse. There will be some books that will tell stories about your local area that you can put on there. People are fascinated with that stuff.
Number eight, do a local store walkthrough video. Go into a local store and ask the manager, “I want to do a local store walkthrough with my camera and I’m only going to say positive things. Don’t worry. I like posting stuff on Facebook to promote local businesses.” The manager is going to say, “Go ahead.” You walk through the store and show people what they got in that store. I promise you, this will attract local people to your Facebook profile because they want to see what’s inside their stores. You can take this post and put it in a Facebook group. That will drive people back to your profile, but you will get tons of conversation. Always make it positive. There will be a lot of conversations when you do this.
Number nine, have you ever been to the Facebook page called Humans of New York? You’ve got to go to this webpage. Go to Facebook.com/honytheseries, Humans of New York the series. What they do is they stop people and interview them about some particular interesting part of their life. They write that up in a story. They take about five photos of the person and post it. That page has eighteen million followers because we’re all voyeurs. We want to look into the lives. If we’re looking into the life of a local citizen in your local area, all the more interesting. You’re going to have people that say, “I know that person. That’s my neighbor.”
That will get a lot of people coming to your Facebook profile. Local restaurant reviews, these go nuts, people, because most of the people in your local town have gone to these restaurants. Always do a positive review of a local restaurant. If you go in there and you don’t have any good thing to say about the restaurant, then do not do it. Don’t say anything about it. We’re not there to make enemies. We’re there to make friends. Go into local restaurants, take a photo of what you ate, say something positive about the restaurant, and post it on your personal profile.
Take where am I photos. You can go to a website called Zazzle.com. You can make a t-shirt with the name of your local city on it. It costs probably about $35. You put that t-shirt on and go into local spots in your neighborhood and ask people to identify where you’re at. These are always a lot of fun and a lot of fun to do as well. Number twelve, popular viral videos. Every now and then you want to post a video that is known to be viral. Go to DailyPicksAndFlicks.com. Snag a viral video from there and post it on your personal profile. If it went viral nationally or globally, it’s going to go viral locally on your personal profile.
Number thirteen, local how do I videos. A lot of people want to know how to do things in your local city. For instance, how do you get a driver’s license? Why don’t you make a video of exactly all the steps you took to get your driver’s license? Here’s your local DMV. This is the one I go to. It is on Highway 3. You show a video going into it and talking to the person at the desk. You take pictures in there. It will make some people uncomfortable, but go ahead and do it. Make a little video on how you renewed your license. There are a lot of things. For instance, how do I challenge my property tax appraisal? I could do a video about that. How do I vote? How do I rent a pavilion at a local park? How do I find out about summer activities that the city offers? How do I rent a mailbox for a home business? These are simple videos you can do that people will be interested in and they’ll get shared to other local people.
Number fourteen, my favorite business videos. Go to your favorite business and shoot a simple video or snap a selfie in front of that business, and say something awesome about that, or get a photo of you and the manager. Number fifteen, who is my favorite business professional? If you go to a local doctor, a local chiropractor, or a local dentist, take a photo of you and that person, and put a recommendation for that local business professional. It could be a pool care provider, a financial planner, a carpet cleaner lawn care, handyman or whatever it is. For me, I do have someone who comes and mows my lawn. I do have a carpet cleaner that comes. I should have a pool care provider. I probably should’ve done that, but I was too stupid. I do my own pool and I wish I didn’t. You can take photos of them, and then make recommendations of them.
Fun local memes. Go to ToonyTool.com and upload photos of your local area. I have one that I made of local Friendswood police cars. I have a little guy on there saying, “If you love our police, give them a shout out.” You will get a ton of engagement on that post from local people. Local police reports. Remember, we’re voyeurs and we always want to know the seedy stuff. We want to know all the, “What’s bad that’s going on?” I don’t know why. I wish we weren’t like that, but we are as humans. You can go to local websites that will show you police reports with photos and everything. You can go to your local online newspaper publication and there’s a ton of them on there.
Number eighteen, announce your local events. All you’ve got to do is go to Google, type in the name of your local city plus the word events. Google has a little function that’s specific for this. It will come up and show you all events in your local area. You take a screenshot of that and post it, and show all the local events coming up. People will love you for that. Number nineteen, local city informational posts. Every city has its website and you would be amazed at all the information you will find on that website that’s pertinent to your local city.
Let me give you an example. I live in Friendswood. This is some of the information you can get off of my local website. How to get a Friendswood construction permit before you make alterations on your home. How to report a local Friendswood code violation when you see it. Do you have a junk vehicle that is in danger of getting towed? If you live in Friendswood and have a pool, there are pool restrictions and guidelines. Do you want to work for the city of Friendswood? You show them the information about how you can get a job with the City of Friendswood.
Here’s how your teenager can get a summer job working in the City of Friendswood. There is a place on the city website that talks exactly about that. You want to volunteer for the City of Friendswood, here’s how you do that. Do you believe your Friendswood Fair Housing Rights have been violated? That’s where you go for that? Do you want a Friendswood City representative to attend your homeowners’ association meeting? All kinds of information that is local to your city will be on that website that nobody knows about that they might find interesting. Go to your local city website and dig up some of that information and post it on your local profile.
Number twenty, be a source for local news. All you have to do is type in the name of your local city in Google and click on the link that says news, and you’re going to come up with a bunch of news articles about your local city. You can post those things and people want to know about them. Curtis, I’m almost done, but I want to get to the good part. Remember, I told you that 1 in every 10 posts should be promotional. I told your readers that I was going to teach them how to do that. I’m going to do that right now. All the twenty ideas I gave you are fun local content that people are going to share locally that’s going to get a lot of people to know, like and trust you. You haven’t talked about your business yet, other than setting up your local profile to generate leads for your local business.
Facebook Marketing: Never go over to someone else’s post and leave a comment disagreeing with them.
Now, I’m going to share with you how to promote locally from that profile. I’m going to give you ten different ideas. You don’t want to do blatant pitches, but you do want to develop some creative, unusual, funny, persuasive and powerful posts that help you to promote your local business. Number one is funny Fiverr videos. People want to be entertained. That’s the fact. First and foremost, people want to laugh. When you get somebody to laugh, it will go more to getting them to like you than providing some hardcore awesome information. That’s the truth. You want to get them to laugh.
Go to Fiverr.com/puppetpals. You can send them a photo of your local business and they will create like a Sesame Street puppet. You can tell that puppet whatever it wants to say. You send a script in and for $10 or $20, they’ll do a video of a local puppet in front of your local business saying whatever you want. People are going to go, “How did you even do that?” They’ll laugh. Customer stories. People love a good story and you can tell your followers what you do through a customer story. This is how you want to write out the story. You use the Problem, Solution, Results formula, the PSR formula. Number one, you state what problem your customer was having. Number two, why they selected you, and number three, what are the results of them now that they’ve done business with you?
That is a customer story. You get their permission before you do a customer story or you might send the customer story after you’ve written it up and ask them, “Is it okay if I use this with a photo of you? Would that be okay?” You’re getting a referral from them but proactively. You’re writing your own referral when you do this. A lot of people who are satisfied with your services will say, “Sure. Go ahead. Use that.” People want to stop on the side of the road and help people. People will always want to help people. Your customers will want to help you.
Number three, do a time-lapse customer video. Ask the customer if you can take a time-lapse video of you performing your service like mowing the lawn or doing dentistry work. Whatever you’re doing with your customer, you can do a time-lapse video of you in action doing that. Even if they’re sitting down at a desk with you. You could show what’s on the computer if it’s not too private. You can show you sitting and talking with that customer, greeting them at the door, saying goodbye to them. It’s a video showing you and your customer and what you do.
Number four, before and after customer photos. Before and after photos are super powerful, but you say, “What if I have a business that is a weight loss business?” For instance, my chiropractor, how could I do a before and after photo with my chiropractor? You could take a photo of your customer frowning and smiling and make it before and after, and then you tell their story. “Before Jenny came in, she was having these terrible back spasms. She’s a young mother. She started to get painful back spasms after picking up her baby so much. Two weeks later, she can’t even feel the pain,” and you do a quote from Jenny. It can be as simple as that.
Number five is do Facebook Lives. A Facebook Live is you going live on your Facebook profile and talking to people. You can do that with your smartphone. You can press a button and go live on Facebook. What you want to do is come up with a list of common questions that people have for what you do in your business. You can do one question at a time, “Today, I’m going to tackle this question.” You do a Facebook Live explaining that question. That Facebook Live can be no less than 2, 5, 6 or maybe even 10 minutes. If there’s a deeper subject, you can go longer than that. You can do Facebook Lives answering questions about your business. You can do demo videos, which is a different version of doing the time-lapse customer video. Doing demo videos shows the different process of what people go through when they are doing business with you.
Behind the scenes videos are good. If you’re local business owner, you can take them right into your office and show them, “Here’s Debbie. She does this,” and Debbie says hi. You can show them the other. You can take them out to your warehouse. You can do a behind the scenes. What happens behind the scenes? It can be an interview with you. Someone can be interviewing you. You can do regular question and answer videos. This is something that I absolutely 100% suggest that you should start with. Do a Q&A video that you upload. Instead of doing a Facebook Live, do a video and upload it. You’re answering a common question that people have.
You can do giveaway post. I told you to create these types of offers. You can make a post offering that offer. If you have a fix-up checklist and you’re a realtor, you can post that checklist right on your personal profile and say, “Go to my personal profile or go to this URL and get this checklist.” You’re starting to build a list from that. You can do what I call it Ten Tips Posts. People love to learn helpful tips. You can create these tips posts that add value, build trust, and position yourself as a local authority in whatever you’re doing.
Let’s stay with realtor. Here are some of the different types of business-oriented tips posts you can do. You may have a home selling tip, a home organizational tip, a home cleaning tip, a pet proofing tip, a maintenance tip, or a home décor tip. How to have a peaceful home, how to reduce dust and toxic chemicals in your home, storm proofing tips, decluttering tips, and energy saving tips. There are a lot of tips that you can give in your business that you can post on your local profile.
I’m sure that the people are going to have to go back and make sure that they’re taking notes and stuff. If somebody follows this, I can see the power fast. They could grow something fast and quick.
It sounds difficult but it’s not that difficult. Those people who are on Facebook every day, how hard is that?
It sounds like to me being intentional. What you’re doing right here is giving us ways to plan it out.
The word intentional is exactly what I was going to say. You took the words out of the mouth. Be intentional about what you’re going to post. I want to give something a little bit extra. I want to give you five ways to use your personal Facebook profile to get a super-fast influx of local customers. Method number one to get a fast influx of local customers is do a refer-a-friend method. Ask friends to refer you to their Facebook friends. What you do is send your friends a local private message. You say, “You’ve done business with me. Would you be willing to refer me to your Facebook friends?”
If they say yes, you then send them what they should post. Don’t make it hard for them. Send them maybe a photo of you and the text and say, “I want to make it easy for you. You can edit this any way you want. If you don’t want to say any of this, rewrite it all.” They go and post it. That is powerful because this is where referrals happen on Facebook. You can ask them to do it. Share a post method. You create a client case study. You post it and private message a bunch of friends and say, “I did a post about a case study of one of my clients. I know that you’re super busy and if you don’t want to do this or you feel uncomfortable doing this, it is okay. It’s no problem at all, but here is a post. Would you help me out? Will you give me a help and share that on your personal profile?”
[bctt tweet=”People want to help people. All you have to do is ask.” via=”no”]
People want to help you. They would be more than happy to help you if they had a good experience with you. How about this one, “Can I use your Facebook profile?” I watched this in action and it’s amazing. I did not think it was going to work, but I was blown away. A friend of mine named Christopher Jones. He is in MLM. That’s network marketing. Some of you have a good experience with network marketing, some of you have not so good of experience with network marketing. He was in a network marketing company called Nerium. This is what he posted. I’m going to read it to you word for word.
This is what his posts said, “TO MY FAMILY AND ASSOCIATES WHO ARE NOT INVOLVED IN NERIUM. If you owned a restaurant, I’d promote it. If you owned a gym, I’d visit and get a great workout in it. If you made organic juice in a juice bar, I drink it and share. I’m a business owner working on helping others to change their lives and I need your help. With your permission, I would like to make one Nerium post on your wall to help me expand my global business. I have a big goal and you can help me to reach that goal. You may not be interested in Nerium, but your friends and family may be. My goal is to reach out to as many people as possible to offer youthful skin, healthier brain, and to live the life of their dreams. If you would allow me to post on your wall, please comment yes in the comments. Thank you for your continued support in my business. I appreciate you.”
I didn’t put a picture of the results, but this guy had over 35 of his friends saying, “Yes, you can do that.” He had 35 referrals and who are they referring? On Facebook, you could have hundreds of friends. Let’s say it shows that to 30% of your friends. Can you imagine how powerful that is? Curtis, I was blown away because a lot of people don’t like network marketing but all his friends said, “Yeah.” People want to help people. All you have to do is ask.
That’s a very direct post. Usually, it’s indirect. I like that approach.
It’s totally out in the open. I’m like, “It’s gutsy for you to do that,” but it was amazing the response this guy got. Number four and I call this the Team Twelve Referral Group Method. This is a little bit more complicated, but in the long run, it will probably bring you the most referrals. For this method, you want to find twelve other local professionals who use Facebook a lot, have a large local following, and have a stellar reputation. You ask them to join your “Team Twelve,” referral group and you explain how it works. You then ask all of the twelve participants to refer another professional in the group on their Facebook profile.
You set up a system for who refers who and when. How does this work? If you’re a realtor, you find eleven other people who are not in your niche that have complementary customers. You ask them, “Would you be willing to refer one of the people in our team twelve every month on your Facebook profile?” If they say yes, they’re part of the team. You build it up to twelve because it’s twelve months. Every month, someone is promoting you to their audience and you are promoting somebody else to their audience. It works. You create a schedule and every month you’re going to get a referral from a trusted professional to your business.
That’s a whole product in itself right there. We can talk a lot about that.
What is BNI?
It’s Business Networking International. It’s exclusive, one per industry.
It’s a referral group for exclusive industries. You’re taking this online. They do that in person. That’s good, but imagine taking it online where hundreds of people see your posts. It makes it way more powerful. Number five, the viral deal method. You come up with a real awesome deal for your business. Come up with an offer that is a crazy, good offer. People love to share great deals with their friends, especially if they’re local deals. Create a deal so good that friends can’t help but share. Let’s say you’re an insurance professional. Maybe it’s a booklet. You compensate somehow, maybe not financially, the people that share it. You post that and you ask people to share that deal with their friends. That is a very simple way. Those are the five ways that will help you to get referred customers quickly.
You can get a quick, super-fast influx of local customers doing this. You don’t want to do them too often. When you do it, you will get your phone ringing quickly. We’re going to the next step which is systematizing that process. I always say willpower is for losers, systems are for winners. If you leave it up to willpower, it isn’t going to happen. Put strict time limits on how much time you will spend on Facebook. I say 15 minutes on your post, and 45 minutes engaging and adding friends, and that’s it. Get off. Be super strict about that. Do not get sucked into the Facebook black hole. You’re there focused for a purpose. With your smartphone, you can create a timer. When that timer goes off, you’re out. You spent your hour on Facebook for that day.
Plan out your local content. Have fun making it. Write it out, “Today, I’m going to do a feel-good story. Local signs is on Tuesday. How do I do something on Wednesday? Police reports on Thursday. Old photos on Friday.” You create a schedule. Take time in your business. The difference between successful small businesses and those that fail, the successful small businesses have a plan for growth. You’d be surprised, most small businesses have no plan for growth. They have no referral plan. Curtis, what is the most important thing in your business? It’s getting customers.
Also, how you’re going to get the customers and referrals are the least expensive way.
That’s the most important. You can have the greatest service but if you don’t get customers, you’re not going to be successful. I went touring around doing referral seminars and I would always do this. I would ask, “How many of you, business owners, here have referrals as the number one way that you get new business?” Over 90%, every single time would raise our hands. What does that mean? It’s that pretty much almost every small local business gets their new customers by way of referral. I’m like, “If that’s the case, if getting customers is the most important part of your business and referral marketing is the number one way to get those customers, what is the most important activity in your business?” It’s referral marketing.
Facebook Marketing: When you get somebody to laugh, you will get them to like you more than provide hardcore information.
I then say, “How many of you have a written referral plan? Please raise your hand.” It’s 2 out of 100. Can you see the irony in that? Isn’t that crazy? “How many of you have hired somebody, a part-time person that is dedicated to your referral marketing activities? How many of you have one? Raise your hand.” Nobody. The most important position in your business is a referral marketing manager and you don’t have one. I know there are a lot of caveats to that, but the concept is still the same. All this stuff I’m talking about, you’re going to go, “I’m so overwhelmed.” Once you start doing it, it’s not that hard like taking pictures, doing case studies, doing store walk-throughs, or restaurant reviews.
What you do is you integrate it into your lifestyle. You create the content as you are living your life, and that is not hard. This is how you were successful in business. I would say to create a little library of promotional content like customer stories, time-lapse videos, before and after posts, Facebook Live, demo videos, Q&A videos, giveaways, tips to post, and stuff like that. Create a little library of those so maybe six months later, you can post them again. I would also create a testimonial page of client videos on your landing page. One of the pages on your landing page should be a bunch of testimonials from people. You can also use scheduling software like Buffer and SmarterQueue. I like SmarterQueue. It’s a great little product. Buffer is a great product. It helps you to schedule all your posts. You can schedule all your posts 2 or 3 months in advance and have it go out automatically. Get your team involved in this. Have them take photos and do restaurant reviews.
Step number eight, you talk about expanding offline. What do you mean by expanding offline?
Remember how I said that you can never replace your relationships online with face-to-face? The most important relationships you’ll have are the ones you had face-to-face. They will always be the most effective. What you want to do is take your online presence and bring it offline. Start getting to know the people offline. What you can do is start now. This is super powerful. Start your own local networking meetup right from your Facebook profile. Start your own networking group. Networking groups can come in a lot of different shapes and forms. You can have a large networking group that’s systematized.
You can start a business lunch group that’s a networking group. What I used to do is I would find a local restaurant that has a buffet and the back room. A buffet because people could go in through the line and get their food. You don’t have to take orders. You don’t have to sit around the table. How much is yours at the end and all that stuff. You’ve been in that situation and you’re like, “I hate that.” Plus, you’re waiting for the meal. You go to a buffet and find a buffet that has a room that you can meet in. Maybe one Thursday or one Friday a month, you’re going to do a business lunch group. You invite people to come and be a part of that. They go through the buffet and they go back into the group.
We did one and we were able to sit about 70 people in that room. The restaurant loved it. They would always save it for us because I filled the house every time. You can also do joint venture seminars. One of the most powerful things you can have is a local email list. The email list of people who live locally, because with the push of a button, you can get customers without any advertising dollars at all. Let’s say you’re a professional and you wanted to educate a bunch of people about what you do and stuff like that. Let’s say you’re a realtor. If you’re a realtor, go to the local accountant and say, “Let’s do a seminar for local people.” You go to a financial planner and say, “Let’s do a seminar for local people.”
All three of you are now sponsoring that local seminar. Each one of you are advertising locally for that seminar. They all come and each one of you gets an opportunity to present to that group. This allows you to get into face-to-face relationship with these people and get to know them. A lot of them will come that were following you on Facebook and you are like a local celebrity. It’s amazing how that works. If they know you on Facebook and you’ve got a lot of followers and then they see you locally, you’re like a celebrity to them. It’s an amazing thing.
Do local volunteering for charity groups. Get ten people that you know. I go up and make peanut butter in a peanut butter factory here in Houston. My church owns it and they distribute that peanut butter throughout the nation for charity. I invite my friends to come. I ask them, “Have you ever worked in a peanut butter factory? Come and work in a peanut butter factory for four hours with me on a volunteer basis. All the peanut butter is going to be given to charity.” I have had some of the coolest experiences doing that.
Facebook is the most powerful referral engine ever created since the dawn of time. I am convinced you can generate more referrals for your local business using Facebook than anything else you can do. The key is to build a lead-generating Facebook profile to build a list of email newsletter subscribers, and then start sending a newsletter to those people. What do you put in a newsletter? It will be you and you can talk about you personally. People love to know about your personal life. It doesn’t always have to be business tips. Number two, create engaging content that makes people laugh, cry, think, be informed and get inspired. Make your content interesting. Number three, strategically send and receive friend requests only from people who live locally. Number four, sprinkle in soft promotional business posts, and number five is to meet people offline to deepen relationships. What’s the old Zig Ziglar quote, Curtis?
“You get everything in life that you want as long as you help enough other people get what they want.”
That is exactly what the strategy is all about using local Facebook profile, giving people what they want. They want to be entertained. They want to be informed. They want to be part of a community. They want to be friends with you. If you do it and you systematize it, you don’t have to be perfect at it. If you take some time to plan it out and systematize it, people will be lining up to your business. You will never be at a loss for customers, clients or patients.
I could see it. If you wanted to start a local, small brick and mortar business, it wouldn’t be so small in the near future. I could see the trajectory. If you were very intentional with your posts and do exactly what you just said, the trajectory would be crazy. I see what you’re doing here and I’m also envisioning. I’m seeing people that I’m friends with on Facebook doing pieces of this and having massive success. I think that is absolutely powerful. You’re saying in step number nine to expand into paid ads. Do you want to talk about that?
If you want to put this whole thing on steroids, do it on a Facebook page and put $10 to every one of your posts.
You can then also click friends of friends so you’re tapping into the next tier. It’s a simple, easy way. If you want to invest and understand paid ads at a more extensive level, you can do more, but the hyper local is awesome.
[bctt tweet=”The difference between successful small businesses and those that fail is that successful small businesses have a growth plan.” via=”no”]
Let me show you my personal profile. Can you see the number of friends that I have?
You probably got rid of a bunch of them, haven’t you? You had 5,000.
I had about 3,400 at one time. Do you see how many friends I have? Say the number.
It’s 2,798.
Look at how many people follow me.
It’s over 8,900.
Combine those two.
That’s over 11,000.
People are following me.
That’s Facebook.com/dfrey.
It’s not like a lot of people know me. If you went back in the 2000, I was more popular. Nowadays, no one knows me, but look at all the followers I have. It’s because I post good stuff.
You do and I love following your stuff. I appreciate you putting together such an amazing presentation that is so value-packed. There are other episodes that we have and we talked for an hour, and we get pieces and nuggets throughout the thing. This is jam-packed. I appreciate it. One of the things that stand out that I talk about when I speak all the time is that it’s not what you do that’s the most important. It’s who you are and how you show up in people’s lives. You don’t get a referral, you earn a referral. What you’re doing here, what you shared, and how you’re showing up in people’s lives with these different posts and stuff is brilliant. I appreciate you taking the time to put something together like this because it will help a lot of people. People are intentional.
Almost nobody is doing this.
Do you have any final thoughts and words of advice?
Facebook Marketing: You will never grow your business to where you want it to be unless you get to the point where you’re working on your business and not in it.
I think it was Michael Gerber who said that you need to work on your business, not in your business. I know that there may be some solo entrepreneurs out there and small businesses that are still working in their business. Meaning, they are providing the service that they offer. The faster you can get to the point where you work on your business, where you’re not delivering yourself the service that your offer, which frees up your time on growing your business. You will never grow your business to where you want it to be unless you get to the point where you’re working on your business and not in your business. Everything we’re talking about is working on your business.
I want people to focus and think about that. How can I get to the point where I’m working on my business and not in my business? What we talked about, you can do it as your lifestyle. You can take all kinds of photos and videos as you go around town. You can go to local newspaper websites and copy it onto your profile because they’re not going to a local newspaper website. You can copy it right onto your profile what they’re doing or share their posts right onto your profile. There are many things you can do very simply and easily in the course of your day on Facebook to start building a local following.
You focus on adding local people as friends and try and make sure that they’re active on Facebook. If I already added all my friends, I would want to make sure that the person that I’m sending a friend request to is somebody that is active. I go to their personal profile and I look. Did they post in the last week? If they posted something last week and you can see that they’re posting weekly, they’re active on Facebook. That person is looking at Facebook every day. That’s the type of person that I want to friend request.
Thank you for taking the time, David. I appreciate it.
Thank you, Curtis. We’ve known each other for a long time and I appreciate and value our friendship.