How Five-Minutes-a-Day Can Double Your Referrals
Are you ‘on’ Facebook? Do you ‘do’ Facebook? Your clients are, and they do.
I don’t mean having a business page on Facebook and sharing something to it every so often. That’s good (and you should definitely keep doing that), but not what I’m talking about. What I’m referring to is the personal side of Facebook. Your actual Joe Advisor profile. How often do you engage with people through that?
I get it, you don’t like Facebook and you only created your business page on there because you heard it would be good for your search engine value. You don’t want to see what people are eating for dinner, or get updates from that person that you intentionally don’t keep in contact with anymore. Here’s a little secret – I’m the same way! But, for the purposes of generating more referrals and opening/increasing lines of communication with your clients, you need to embrace the personal side of Facebook. You can do this in two easy steps that I promise will fit right into your already busy schedule…
First, friend request all your clients.
You may be the type of advisor who considers all of your clients to be friends, and you go to their family events and keep in regular contact with them. You may be the opposite, maintaining a very high level of business professionalism and keeping your clients at arm’s length, only engaging with them once or twice a year. Either way, friend request all of your clients.
Second, engage with them every day.
Here’s the easy part: get on Facebook every day, scroll through your newsfeed and look for posts that you can comment on. Spend 5 minutes doing this daily.
Don’t have five minutes? I bet you do…
- How long do you wait in line for your coffee every morning?
- How long do you spend eating your breakfast at your desk every morning?
- Do you commute on the train? How can you be using that time to build your business?
- What about lunch time? Are you eating at your desk and trying to type with one hand?
- I bet you don’t want to admit that your phone visits the restroom with you…
If you have the Facebook app on your phone, it’s much easier to multi-task, scroll through your newsfeed and comment from there, because you can be doing that typically one-handed, and you don’t have to be at your desk to do it.
It’s important to say again, you need to be commenting, not just reacting. Reacting – Liking, hearting, laughing – that does nothing. How often do you look at the names to see who liked your post? Probably never. But commenting – more often than not, people get notifications on their phone when someone comments on a post. They read those comments, often reply to those comments. I can practically guarantee that your comment will get read. It doesn’t even have to be an elaborate comment. If they post a picture of their new grandbaby, you can say, “Great picture, congratulations!” If they post a picture of the beach that they’re currently relaxing on, you can say, “Wow I’ve always wanted to go there, you’ll have to tell me about it sometime!”
Why It Works
In the five seconds it took you to write and post a quick comment on someone’s update, you just built the same kind of social capital as you could have through more traditional methods of communication. Think about how much it means to someone when you take the time to write them a hand-written letter or note, or to call them on their birthday, even to take them to lunch. That kind of social capital is powerful and can push you into an advisor/friend category. Once you’ve branched into the advisor/friend category, you stay top of mind more. People want to refer you more, help you more, and they trust you more. You’ve opened the lines of communication with those people you may otherwise only see once or twice a year, and the growth potential of that is powerful.
