If you are a service provider, freelancer or any solopreneur who replies on their personal brand to get clients, you must use your Facebook personal profile for Client Attraction, or you are missing out!
Facebook forbids using personal profiles for commercial gain, but we know that business is often done through connections and conversations. How many deals are closed over dinner or an informal meeting in the bar or a coffee shop? We choose to work with people we like and trust more than a faceless brand, no matter how much advertising it may throw at us. When you are connecting to people on Facebook, you are using your personal profile. Facebook pages cannot outreach to people — unless you run ads.
But running ads not only requires a reasonable budget, more importantly, but it also requires an intimate understanding how to convert cold traffic of people exhausted by mediocre advertising everywhere they go, so much, that they simply do not respond to most of them anymore. This is another learning curve that most of the time is unnecessary and needs to be outsourced to an expert while you are focusing on what is essential creating great products and services and serving your existing clients. But not everyone can afford an ad manager, or even have a budget to run ads altogether.
If your business needs only a handful of clients to operate, your personal profile is a much better weapon for you! With your personal profile, you can join Facebook groups that promote interests that your ideal clients share and position yourself as a go-to expert in the group. At the same time, you can start connecting to those who engage with you by sending them a friend request behind the scenes and starting private Messenger conversations. Throw posting inspirational content on your profile into the mix to help them resonate with you and your stuff on a deeper level than any “business”-like content ever can! And here is the trick.
You CAN target different groups in your connections with posts, designed to engage them and not annoy or repel the other ones. So you can almost use your Facebook profile as a customer management tool! Would you like to know why? The answer is simple — you should be using Friends Lists! This is a hidden treasure for anyone who is looking for clients to connect to online, and it opens a whole new dimension of using your personal brand to attract and convert, without breaking Facebook rules or being spammy or salesy.
You can create different lists, for example, New Connections, Prospects, Hot Leads, Existing Clients, Dream Clients and, of course, Friends and Family and separate your connections into those lists. A cool thing that you can even add users that you are sending your friend requests to into those lists BEFORE they accept it!!! So when they do, they are already in the list that can be targeted with a much more “introductory” content, aimed at informing about who you are an what you do and warming them to wanting to know more.
All you have to do is go into your post privacy and select a particular list this post is designed for. Another cool feature is that on the desktop version, Facebook creates mini Newsfeeds within those lists, so you can, for example, engage with your new connections more, to entice them to follow your content more. Everyone loves when they get someone engaging with them, and they will feel obliged to return a favour. Let alone the fact, that this employs the algorithm indicating there is an interaction between these users and Facebook will show more of you to each other.
Do you see the potential? And then when a connection becomes obviously interested, you can move them to a list called Hot Leads and post content that will push their pain points, or empower them to take a step forward while ensuring them you are the right person to guide them through it or do it for them! This type of content is too aggressive for a new connection, yet for someone who is ready and needs a gentle nudge — this could be all you need to make them take a leap of faith and hire you. Friends Lists are not new, but they seem to be neglected since marketers are traditionally focusing on Pages, yet I find this is the magic tool to connect, influence and create long-lasting relationships with your ideal clients using your personal profile on Facebook.