AP 0581: How Can I Get Facebook Influencers to Share My Content?

AskPat 581 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey what's up everybody, Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 581 of AskPat. Thank you for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

All right, here's today's question from Brandon.

Brandon: Hey Pat, thanks for taking my question. I've recently published an ebook and a blog called Bootstrapping The Food Revolution: A New Entrepreneur's Guide to Starting a Hydroponic Farm-to-Table Business for Under 15k. The blog is simply BootstrappingTheFoodRevolution.com. For now, I have the same content in the ebook and the blog because I'm just trying to share the information so anyone can see it. They can start their own business on a bootstrap budget. I believe a lot of people would be interested in this idea, it's just a matter of them finding it.

So my question is, what are your best tips on getting Facebook gatekeepers to share my blog? For example, there's a few related Facebook groups out there, with thousands of followers, and they're consistently posting articles about how starting a farm has become to cost-prohibitive. And even though I've reached out to them, I've introduced myself and my free blog, I haven't yet had any traction. This is a little frustrating because to me, they're ignoring what I believe is a great solution to a problem that they're always talking about. I'm not selling anything on my website, I only have affiliate links. So I don't really think that this is a big turn off.

So Pat, how would you suggest that I break though to them so my blog can potentially go viral? Thanks.

Pat Flynn: Hey Brandon, what's up, thank you so much for the question today. I appreciate this question because definitely, going and reaching out to Facebook influencers, or gatekeepers as you say which is kind of a cool term for it, because they are really the people at the gate before you could potentially go viral on some of these platforms and Facebook is definitely a big one out there and there's a lot of great groups, a lot of great communities out there, where if you get in good with the leaders of these communities, they can definitely share your stuff to their audience and you could actually get a lot more traffic, a lot more exposure, subscribers, and even customers in that way. So I'm glad that you're already trying to kind of reach out and have conversations with them, however, you do need to capture their attention in one way or another, and I have a few ideas for you that you can use if just simply reaching out and having a conversation with them is not working.

So here's one thing that I would recommend doing that has worked in the podcasting world. I've shared this tip before, a lot of people have used it. You can do it whether you have a podcast or not. And that is actually interviewing those owners or those admins. So you go into a group, you get access to it, you can actually click on Members and then in the members section in Facebook you can click on admins to see who the leaders are. You can reach out to all or just one of them, maybe the one you know is most active if you've been in this community already, and even before you get into reaching out to them it might be great for you to become a part of the community too. And that way you actually start to build a relationship, not just with them, because they'll see you actually being involved and adding value to the community, but you're building a relationship with the people who are in that community too. And that alone can help you get traffic and people back to your website, new email subscribers, potentially customers, because when you offer value people are going to want to learn more about you. And if they find out what you have to offer from there, great.

Now, you don't want to go in and get access to a community and a group and just start promoting your own stuff. That's like going to a party for the first time, meeting people and saying “Hey do you want to buy my stuff?” Like, nobody likes that person. So go in there, add value and they're going to want to learn more about what you have to offer and then when they finally ask, you can then share what you have and all this great stuff. You can actually become sort of an influencer in that specific community. Even though you're not an admin, even though you don't own that community over time, that can begin to happen. You begin to have some authority in these little communities which is really cool because people just see you all the time, they see that you're knowledgeable about this particular topic.

So, that's actually where I would start. The other thing you could do is reach out to those admins, like where I was going earlier. And when you reach out to them, actually ask them for an interview. That captures their attention. “Hey, I want to interview you for my blog. Can you answer this one question for me?” Those types of question and engagements get people to actually pay attention because they know they're going to be featured somewhere else. So on your blog or on your website for example, you might want to compile the top answers from the top five influencers in this space about one particular item related to your topic. And that way you actually get to talk to them, you get to provide value to them because you're actually linking back to their websites and sharing them, and likely they're going to want to share that article with their community.

This is where it works really well when you interview someone on a podcast for example, because you're asking them questions, you're making them look great, they're featuring themselves and their community. Of course, when that thing comes out and it's public and is published, they're going to want to share it with their community and you'll get a lot more exposure that way, though that association. So asking that person for an interview or featuring their answer to a question on your website is a great way to start to get some traffic back to your site, start to get noticed, start to have a relationship where you're actually providing value to these people too.

Other than that, you can actually offer to pay them to actually promote, do sort of a reviewed post, or you could pay them money, or you could to a share for share, an “S4S” as they call it and that's kind of a you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back type of thing. So if there's something that you could do for these people … this is a less organic way than I talked about earlier, the interview one is sort of more organic, it's more natural. This one is a, “Hey, I will pay you money or I will do this service for you or I will do this thing for you in exchange for you actually promoting this article in your Facebook community.” So you can start that conversation that way too. Of course that incentive is really important.

So those are the kind of things you an actually do to capture these people's attention, and just keep trying. I think that's the only thing. You don't want to give up, you obviously don't want to be pushy, but if reaching out to the admins is not working, try going into the community and becoming an authority there yourself. And you can only do that by adding value and getting to a point where then they are interested in what you have to offer. So you can almost kind of bypass those gatekeepers and become a gatekeeper in and of yourself in these different communities that way.

So Brandon, thank you so much for the question, I appreciate you. We're going to send you an AskPat T-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And for those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show too, just head on over to AskPat.com, you can ask right there on that page.

Cheers, take care, thank you so much, and here's a quote to finish off the day. And today's quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson. He said, “The only person you are destined to become, is the person you decide to be.” Cheers, take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.