On Monday, February 6th at 4 PM I posted on my Facebook page the following:

Bare with me, trying a FACEBOOK experiment that will become a blog post about its success, let’s see if it works:
I am looking for my Facebook friends to help me grow my business. It’s easy -send me Qualified Referrals (people you know in marketing or related fields or high level executives). Send me an email (nathan@ideationpromos.com) with a list of their names and contact info and get a $5.00 starbucks gift card and a cool IDEATION T-Shirt. Send me an email with the most qualified referrals and get a Kindle Fire delivered from me! Small print – I reserve the right to decide what is qualified and what is “you just trying to add names to a list.” If you know me, you know how good we take care our customers (to clients: back me up here) so of course you can be rest assured Ideation Promotions & Apparel will take good care of them! Thanks in advance for putting up with the request and your help!

I then commented below the post that the deadline to do so was Wednesday, February 8th at 12 PM.  The following outlines my experiment and its results.

AIM: To answer the question: Will Facebook “friends” respond on a personal Facebook page to a post requesting for warm lead referrals when incentivized to participate (a $5.00 Starbucks gift card and IDEATION T-Shirt) and rewards the person who sent the most qualified leads. (A free AMAZON Kindle)

Hypothesis: Even with a large number of Facebook “friends”, and a good incentive to participate, repsonse to requesting referrals will go unanswered.

Procedure:  On Monday, February 6th, I posted the message above and then followed up with a comment stating that the deadline to participate was Wednesday, February 8th at 12 PM.  Then we waited for 44 hours.

Results: 2 people liked the comment, and 1 of the 2 sent in non qualified referrals (more on that later).  Another friend that I commented on one of his post commented back and then told people reading his post to check out my post.  This was not a post share, just a broadcasted comment below a post on his page.

I received 2 emails. The first was from one of the people who liked my post.  However, although their heart was in the right place, it wasn’t a great referral.  The friend that referred just started a new job and said in the referral they were new, they didn’t know how referring was looked upon in the company and here are some names, but don’t mention his name.  So, really that’s a cold call.  He’s still getting a Starbucks card and a T-shirt just for participating.

The second person that sent me a referral misunderstood the post and thought I was asking for ways to grow my business and sent me a bunch of online marketing people that could help me out with SEO and other online marketing strategies.  Not a bad idea, but not at all what I was going for.  I thanked her and told her what I was really looking for and she said she’d get back to me…she did, but couldn’t think of anyone.  She’s still getting a Starbucks card and a T-shirt…sweet girl and she took serious time in trying to help.

Discussion:  Upon further review of this experiment I can admit that my post may not have been as clear as it needed to be.  In the business world, I am so use to working by referral that I assume everyone knows what that means.  Facebook is primarily a big living room or coffee shop to talk about all things involved in the “game of Life.”  It isn’t an office, so better results may have been garnered had I done a better job of posting the question.  Furthermore, I only posted it once, so it is entirely possible that only an unmeasurable small percentage of my Facebook friends actually saw the post. However,  I will say after all this though, the results are about what I expected.

Conclusion:  It is evident that Facebook may not be the place to have business come to you.  Although, the question posed may have been better written, there was still very little response or follow up.  I have some possible conclustions as to why this was:

1. The post was not noticed and therefore there was no response. In Feb. 2010 it was reported that there are 700 Facebook status update per second!
2. My friends don’t know what I do well enough to refer.  Shoot I have to explain to members of my family still what exactly it is I do…
3. My friends don’t trust my skills and abilities well enough to refer them to me (this is highly unlikely considering we work mainly by referral and are successful, but perception is everything and if they knew me from school I wasn’t exactly the most focused student.
4. My friends don’t know how to refer – see #5 below.
5. My friends prefer to refer to an inquirer as opposed to the business.  That would look like one of my friends hears  their friend John is looking for water bottles and says, “Oh you should call my friend, Nate.”
6. There is too much “personal” clutter (photos, status updates, etc) for a business post to be relevant.

I will be honest, the post in general seemed grimy, but curiosity got the best of me so I had to ask.  I prefer to think of Facebook as a living room or coffee shop.  Although business is done at both those places, it comes over the course of a conversation.  Coming right out and asking is just awkward, and it felt that way when I posted.  (Thank you all for putting up with it).

A recent article on HubSpot blog (click to read) shows some proof to my experiment with similar research data points.  They found that 5,000 of both B2B and B2C businesses converted on 0.77% of visitors to their Facebook business page into leads. Leads are defined as people who have shown an interest in doing business with you. Our experiment was done on my personal Facebook page, where we get more traffic and reach more people, but the company was tagged in the posting so people could have easily clicked and checked out our business page.  That is an extremely low conversion rate.  I’d literally have a better conversion rate cold calling.

If you read the article you’ll see that LinkedIn has the highest amount  of visitor to lead conversions at 277% and Twitter is the least with .69%.  I became a paying LinkedIn member yesterday. I would agree with the article that the lack of clutter in the posting area helps with their high conversion rate.  And of course LinkedIn is designed for business professionals to connect with other business professional with an unspoken expectation of possibly doing business together.

I have also had great success using social media to obtain clients.  My biggest and best client, and now one of my really good friends, came from research done on LinkedIn and Facebook. So Facebook does work to find leads. but my conclusion is that Facebook works much better as a research tool to go get business and not as an avenue to have business come to you.  It’s not the best referral generator.

1 person with 1 good referral could be using a Kindle Fire today…just sayin’.

What about you? Have you ever gotten business from a personal Facebook page?  Have you ever used Facebook to ask for business?  What are your thoughts on the practice of asking for business on a personal Facebook page?