A step by step guide for using Facebook messenger to book prospect interviews
This is an extremely useful, efficient, and quick tool to use to build a pipeline of interviews.
The Strategy
The strategy is simple: every morning send 5 messages out to Facebook Pages.
This is a great activity to do when you cannot book interviews on the phone or in person (because it’s too early, too late, or the weekend / holiday).
Now, do NOT expect replies right away! Sometimes it takes a couple hours, or even days. The goal is to build your pipeline of interviewees (and prospects for your business!)
BE CAREFUL NOT TO SEND TOO MANY COLD MESSAGES PER HOUR.
By cold, we mean, that you are messaging a person you’re not friends with, or a page or group that you are not a part of (or just at that moment joined before messaging).
We’ve found that going above 10 Cold Messages Per Hour results in a chat ban for a couple hours.
The Process
STEP 1: Identify Search Terms (Location, Industry)
The most effective search methods I’ve found is to search by area, then industry.
Ex. searched above: “89015 photography”.
"89015" is the area and "photography" is the industry.
STEP 2: Pick 5 Pages
Likely your search results will have way more than 5 pages to choose from so use this checklist to decide who to message.
How Many Likes?
How Many Reviews?
STEP 3: MESSAGE THEM :)
There are 2 main opening scripts we like to use and they go as follows. The key is to keep it simple! No need to tell them everything in the first message, let them ask questions naturally :)
This is a simple opener: best used for pages where the owner might not be running their Facebook Page.
“Hello! I was looking to speak with someone about having [BUSINESS NAME] interviewed and featured on a local website.”
Below is the more extensive opener: best used for pages where the owner will be running their Facebook Page.
“Hey (BUSINESS NAME), I was wondering if we could do an interview with you and feature that on a local website! https://parkbench.com/YOURAREA ”
STEP 4: Wait for Replies
It’s time to close people!
This is what you’re trained for!
Answer any questions they have.
Get them excited.
Book the interview.
Schedule into your calendar.
Send the invite.
Send the questions over.
And then move on to your next task!
PROS & CONS
Advantages of Booking Interview through Facebook Messenger
- Extremely time efficient
- A great thing about sending a Facebook message, is that you will end up using template messages for each request sent out
- A simple copy, paste, and insert names, and you’re good to go!
- You have the ability to hyperlink your Parkbench site right into the message
- As you can imagine, providing someone with a clickable link to your site, will receive more first time visitors than telling someone the site over the phone
- Easy record management
- By simply going through you sent Facebook messages, you are able to see in a snapshot all the businesses/people that you’ve messaged
- This allows you to analyze the efficiency of your messages
- Times of the day that you sent the message
- Which of your templated messages works better
- How many interviews you’ve actually booked
- Ability to start an ‘online relationship’ with that business or professional
- Tack on an extra 15 seconds into your Facebook message prospecting, and like/follow the businesses and professionals that you message on Facebook!
- This will make something like sharing the interview onto the interviewees’ Facebook page much easier and with less pressure or wariness
Disadvantages of Booking Interview through Facebook Messenger
- If you send too many messages out during a 24 time frame, Facebook can and might temporarily block your account for suspicious activity
- A little less personable
- The potential interviewee doesn’t get to put a face to your name (yes, they can click on your name and check out your Facebook profile), but we all know sometimes it just isn’t the same as in person
- Delayed responses
- Sometimes, business pages and professionals won’t respond for a day or two
- Potential Scheduling Conflicts
- Because some messages you won’t receive responses for until a couple days later, you might find yourself with 4 or 5 people asking to be interviewed all on the same day. But this is a good problem to have ;)
ACTION STEPS
- Create at least 3 different Facebook message templates for booking interviews
- Search for businesses, professionals, entrepreneurs on Facebook in your area
- Do a search and like/follow your favorite places to frequent in your area!
- Check out some of the pages or businesses you may already like or follow
- Test out a couple of your template messages with a couple friends
- Ask them for feedback :)
- Send them out!
- Test their bounce rate / close ratio
- Continue to alter and edit these moving forward
Click the thumbnail below to watch a video of it being done!