This is Day 20 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
This actually has to be one of the more challenging tasks. In order to get a boost in your fan base, it’s important to get users to invite their friends. So what methods are there for getting users to invite their friends? The first and most obvious method is to ask users to invite their friends. This can surprisingly have a large impact. The other day I asked my users to invite their friends and a few people invited hundreds of their friends. The problem with this is that it doesn’t maximize the impact you could theoretically have by providing some sort of incentive.
By incentivizing the user to invite their friends to your Page, you increase the likelihood that one of their friends will actually be interested in your company or brand. On applications Facebook has strict rules surrounding incentivizing invites because many applications has used this feature to force users to spam their friends. While the restrictions don’t exist on Facebook, the best invite responses will come from those that aren’t forced.
Applications Are Important
While applications take more resources to get completed, you can use Facebook’s API to develop contests as well as run basic statistics about your user base. There are numerous ways to take advantage of applications to get users to invite their friends but here are three that we suggest:
1. Create A Gifting Application
Many Facebook Pages now have gifting applications that have become integrated with them. The reason is that every time a user sends a gift to their friend, you can drive them back to your Facebook Page. Free gifts happen to be the most obvious thing to send to friends which would explain why a number of Pages have already begun implementing this feature. Thankfully there are a few applications like Wildfire’s promotions app that lets you quickly create a gifting application.
2. Have A Referral Leaderboard
This one will require a little bit of programming but in thinking about incentivized invites, I thought of one of the most obvious ways of getting people to invite others: create a contest out of it. Using the Facebook API, you can’t track the actual invites that are sent but you can track the relationships among fans. This means you can rank people within your community based on the number of friends that they have as fans. It’s kind of a gimmicky model but should be worth the effort.
3. Create a Contest
The third model would be to create a contest application. I’ll outline more about contests and competitions in the next section but the point is that contests are a great way to attract repeat engagement. Check out the Promotions application created by WildfireApp for examples of existing contests.
Daily Task
Brainstorm two or three ways to get users to invite their friends. What can you offer to your existing fans that will make them want to tell their friends?
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The Referall Leaderboard tip was a great way to solve the problem of "how do I get to know how many people you brought to the FP", tnx!1
Comment by Sibbu Molina — September 7, 2009 @ 11:27 am
I'm not "wild" about the wildfire app…too expensive and too much spam e-mail after signing up with them I was totally disappointed.
Comment by Angela — September 7, 2009 @ 12:14 pm
We have http://www.facebook.com/altitudere. Our staff held a party in our office with laptops set up. It was called "grow our facebook page night" We got together some people who could benefit from each others networks, made it a party atmosphere with drinks food and music and during the 1 1/2 hours people jump on and all hit the suggest to friends buttons. Everyone had a laugh and worked well. They also got to come into our office and had an appreciation for our pro-active mindset:)
Comment by Paul Tonich — September 7, 2009 @ 12:44 pm
We recently launched 5, sports fantasy, facebook apps. It's not your traditional fantasy in that it's super simple and you really don't need to be a sports expert to play.
For each, we added a contest where people playing the games could become eligible to win $1,000. It's simple and completely free.
What surprises me, is that even with this, it's difficult to get people to join. I would really like to hear what others think. Thanks.
http://apps.facebook.com/baseball-contest/
Comment by Dave — September 7, 2009 @ 6:48 pm
i have personaly experience "Have A Referral Leaderboard" have a most important role
Comment by crunchitech — September 7, 2009 @ 11:28 pm
we are networking with local nightclub promoters who tend to have a growing list (1500+)to exchange the suggest to friends and we give them an update or a spot on our wall (Local Groups). We started Aug.5th & today we just hit 4400. Our goal is 5000 by Oct. & in the coming days we will be adding an FBML made Guest List to local clubs. We will keep you posted!
http://www.facebook.com/palmbeachcounty
Comment by lenny mauricio — September 8, 2009 @ 10:59 pm
For the leaderboard, which api calls are you using. I wanna slap together a free white label version of this for the community.
Comment by S_Dev — September 9, 2009 @ 1:36 pm
Last week I created a Cause for a non-profit organization which also has links to our page and video. The Cause app which is already on Facebook (No time wasted creating an app) allows you to create a cause for anything including some of the most ridiculous things like "Petition to allow Farmville game players to purchase fuel with game coins" (seriously this is real). Point is you can create any Cause you want. My non-profits Fan page is (www.facebook.com/getfocusedfitness) We really are working to raise awareness about the impact obesity is having on our communities and provide free programs to educate and fight against the rise. So I created a "Help Get Focused stop the rise of Obesity in America" cause (http://apps.facebook.com/causes/347096/11938921?m=8d3e39f8) Once people sign up as someone who supports this cause the application automatically prompts them to make a pledge to forward it on to their friends and routes them to a page where they can do so. In 1 week I doubled our Fan list. It took us 2 months to get about 100 fans. Here a week later we are at 200+ Fans. Give it a try!
Comment by Ayisha Oglivie — September 14, 2009 @ 4:17 pm
I love the leader board idea and would love to see any live examples and learn more about which API calls were used to make them.
Thanks! Great post and idea.
Comment by Brenna Holmes — September 16, 2009 @ 7:57 am
Do you have any actual examples of applications that can accomplish this? This is great advice but I have yet to find an application that can accomplish this.
Comment by Muhammad Saleem — September 25, 2009 @ 7:57 am
I'm also looking for an leader board application. Have googled for hours and still nothing. Any idea?
Comment by Peter — January 17, 2010 @ 1:13 pm
Does anyone have any info on how we can implement a leaderboard application into our fan pages?? its a great idea. but is it even possible?
Comment by Emile — February 6, 2010 @ 4:32 am
I'm also keen in implementing a leaderboard application in our fanpage.. any direction to share?
Comment by Daniel — May 5, 2010 @ 1:11 am
Thnx for the help..!!!
Comment by Funwidmasti — May 30, 2011 @ 3:13 pm
Very interesting post article.
I am specifically interested in "Using the Facebook API, you can’t track the actual invites that are sent but you can track the relationships among fans".
I have browsed Facebook developper pages and still have not figured out how to do so.
Can someone help me ?
Thanks a lot!
Comment by Julien Lab — December 8, 2011 @ 11:17 pm