I first joined Facebook because it seemed like a good way to stay in touch with close friends and family who are scattered across the country (What a quaint idea that seems like now). But I didn’t get really serious about Facebook until the newspaper I worked for – the Seattle Post-Intelligencer – went belly up in 2009.
Left with no outlet for writing and/or pontificating, I, like everyone else in the United States at the time, started my own blog. I also started working with the Seattle PostGlobe, an online news startup that was founded by former P-I journalists.
It didn’t take me long to realize that Facebook could help drive traffic to my blog and to the news site, and that the more friends I had, the more traffic I could drive.
So it began – the quest for Facebook popularity. By the time my quest was completed I had thousands of “friends” and every time I posted from my blog or from the PostGlobe, it increased traffic to those pages.
You may have had a similar quest, or you may be on it now. Maybe you’ve started noticing that all your friends – real ones and those new ones you’re slowly starting to get on Facebook – have way more friends than you do. I know. I know. It can be embarrassing.
So how are you going to get those “friend” numbers climbing? Well, don’t start surfing the web for the answer. There seem to be a lot of people out there who have exhausted the potential of asking random internet strangers help them distribute their deceased spouse or fallen dictator’s money. Now they have turned to helping people find Facebook friends.
Here’s a great example (errors in copy are from the original):
Everyone want that it should have thousands of Facebook friends. Why you want a huge number of friends in your account? There are many reasons:
- You want to show others that you have that number of Facebook friends.
- You want to make a fan page and want huge number of friends to give it maximum exposure.
- You are selling something and want customers to your product from Facebook.
- You are a webmaster and want regular traffic to your website from it.
Ok, any reason there may be but here is how you can add 5000 Facebook friends in 7 days only. Use the following formula and you will surely get 5000 friends in 7 days only and in a guaranteed way.
1. Make a new Facebook Account with a girl’s profile and pictures.
2. Download any email list generator like “Acute Email IDs Production Engine“, do not use email extractor, as it will be of no use to you. (The above was a hot link in the original that took you to a site where you had to buy the production engine.)
The author goes on and on with eight more steps, but I think you get the idea.
The truth is, if you want to get thousands of Facebook friends, the best approach is to do it the old fashioned way: one invite at a time.
Facebook encourages you to add friends by suggesting friends every time you open your home page. So, if you see someone who looks interesting, invite that person to be your friend.
Of course, that is a slow process, and if you don’t really know the person, chances are pretty good that she/he won’t accept you.
So, here’s what I did. (and here is where it gets tricky, and a little sticky, and where your friends, if they find out, might accuse you of being a poacher) To get friends who will accept your invitation, you need to go to your friends’ Facebook page, call up their friends’ list and starting firing off friend invitations. You and these people will have at least one friend in common, right? Run through the list, and don’t be too choosy. The goal is to increase your numbers, not to recruit new members for to your book club or add to your list of drinking buddies. These are Facebook friends, not real friends.
Repeat this process with all of your friends. But be careful! Don’t invite more than 15 to 20 per day or Facebook will freeze your ability to send invitations for a day or even a week if you’ve really been bad (I mean good). And Facebook is getting stricter all the time. They want you to invite friends, but they don’t want to be seen as encouraging spam. So they will warn you and then freeze you. If you get a warning, back off for a day or two. Then go at it again.
As your numbers start growing into the hundreds, you’ll notice a fun thing. People start inviting you to be friends. People you’ve never heard of and have no connection to. And, as you continue to invite your way through your real friends’ lists and then through your new-found friends on Facebook lists, you’ll be getting several invitations per day.
Within a couple of months – not seven days like the guy above promised – you will have a couple thousand friends.
I used this pretty simple method to run up around 3,000 “friends” last year before I decided to slow down and actually start being selective. Facebook limits personal accounts to around 5,000 friends maximum and after that you have to create a “fan” page and basically start all over trying to get people to “fan” you. Doesn’t sound like fun.
I now have nearly 3,500 friends and it’s slowly growing.
This year I got a real job and suddenly my blog seems a little superfluous. Driving traffic via Facebook seem less important these days. But even so, thanks to all of those friends, I have a unique and always changing source of news and information – coming in 24/7 from all around the world.
One last tip:If you get as ‘popular’ as I did you may want to keep track of real friends – the ones you might have a face-to-face with someday or maybe a drink with at the neighborhood bar, you know, people you actually know – by creating a separate Facebook list and move them into that list. Then you can click on that list in your newsfeed to see what’s up with your friends when you get tired and confused by the posts of all those thousands of other friends.
Or you could just call one of your real friends and go out somewhere. Naaaahhh!
Larry Johnson was National/Foreign Editor at the Seattle P-I from 1998 to 2009. He is now a Senior Writer at Nyhus Communications.
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