How to Build Your Business’s Facebook Friend Network

6 of 10 in Series: The Essentials of Creating a Facebook Page to Market Your Business

Building your personal friend network on Facebook can have a resonating effect on your professional persona. By encouraging your friends to become fans of your business’s Page, your updates appear on their News Feeds and increase your Page’s exposure to all their friends. All good Facebook marketers know that their friends can be valuable viral enablers within Facebook.

Finding Facebook friends

You can find friends and contacts by using several search and import capabilities within Facebook. To start, follow these steps:

Go to your Home page by clicking the Home link on the top navigation bar.
Click the Friends link on the right side of the page.

The Friends page appears.
Identify someone with whom you want to be Facebook friends.

You have several options for locating potential friends:
- If you want to import contacts from your e-mail client, click the Find Friends link and enter your e-mail address and password. Click Agree to give Facebook access to your contacts and then decide which contacts you want to add as friends.
- Click the Other Tools link at the bottom to find former high school classmates, current or past college classmates, or current or past coworkers. Click the appropriate link for the group you’re interested in and then browse the list on the search results page.
- Enter a Facebook user’s name or e-mail address in the default search box at the top of the screen or by navigating to the Facebook Search Page.
After you identify a Facebook member with whom you want to reconnect, extend a friend request by clicking the Add as Friend link to the right of that person’s name within the search results.

You can also send a friend request from within someone’s profile page. Simply visit that person’s profile page and then click the Add as Friend button. (Note: Because you’re not already friends, you have access only to profiles of members with a common network, depending on their privacy settings.)

The Send a Friend Request dialog box appears.
(Optional) Click Add a Personal Message and enter a message in the text box that appears.

If you enter a message, the person has a point of reference when she receives your friend request.
Click Send Request.

Your request is sent to the user’s Facebook account.

Creating Facebook Friends lists

After you have a healthy number of friends, Facebook lets you organize your gaggle into lists, or groups. For example, you can create a work list that consists of coworkers or business contacts. Lists allow you to quickly view friends by type and then send messages to an entire list. Facebook allows up to 100 lists with up to 1,500 friends per list.

To create a list, follow these steps:

Click the Friends tab in the left navigation pane on your home page.

The Friends page appears.
Click the Edit Friends button at the top-right of the page.
On the page that appears, choose All Friends from the drop-down list, and then click the Create a List button.

The Create New List dialog box appears.
Enter a name for the list in the Enter a Name text box.

For example, enter Work Friends.
Select friends by clicking their profile pictures.

To find the friends to include in your new list, you can either browse your friends list or enter a person’s name in the search field at the top right of the dialog box.
Click the Create List button.

A page appears where you can edit the new list’s name, or add and remove friends from that list.