How You Can Add Me As A Friend On Facebook - Digital Marketing With Dean James

So no one told you life was gonna be this way
Your job’s a joke, you’re broke
Your love life’s DOA
It’s like you’re always stuck in second gear
When it hasn’t been your day, your week, your month
Or even your year, but
I’ll be there for you
(When the rain starts to pour)
I’ll be there for you
(Like I’ve been there before)
I’ll be there for you
(‘Cause you’re there for me too)

We made it to post 10 – Can I get a high five?

Not THAT kind of high 5!

‘Facebook Friend’; There’s an ambiguous term if ever there was one.

If you’ve known me in any capacity and for any length of time, one thing you will know about me is that I am in the internet marketing niche and because of this you get ‘friends’ adding you on Facebook that are also fellow internet marketers, which is cool… or at least it would be.

Allow me to explain…

A large percentage of those people that add you as friends really just want to sell me something. They either want to get me to join a program or buy one of their products and you know something, I have nothing against that at all, but the way they usually try to achieve that is as follows:

Step #1: They add me as a friend (so far, so good)

Step #2: They pretend to be interested in me or one of my posts. They say things like, “What are you upto in your online business” or “I see you’re in the same group as me” or “I see you are a fellow affiliate marketer”.

You know, something really lame like that.

Some just add you and go straight into a pitch, like this guy did
a few minutes ago while I was typing this post:

[Screenshot of a PM I received on FB at 16:13 GMT 26/04/24)

I initially blurred out his surname to respect his privacy despite the fact his first correspondence with me was a pitch but there is an update to follow further down this post. To be fair to this guy, this is nothing new and seems to be the way a lot of marketers are addressing their ‘friends’ on Facebook these days.

I wonder what their internal dialogue consists of? I imagine it goes something like this…

Shameless Marketer: Adds Friend
Shameless Marketer: Sends PM To New Friend who they do not yet know trying to sell them on some crappy product or service
Shameless Marketer: Wonders why they aren’t getting the results they have been hoping for.
Shameless Marketer: Doesn’t spend long reflecting on this and continues to play the numbers game cold-pitching new friends they’ve added.

I didn’t ask him for this information and I’ve never interacted with this person before, he just thought he would PM me with it just because he’d added me as a friend on Facebook. Also it’s complete BS when someone sends a PM like this saying you can make $15,000 dollars daily. I can’t believe people post this garbage on Facebook and expect people to sign up for whatever it is that is being sold.

Seriously, nobody is making $450,000 a month with whatever he is trying to get people to buy into. If you get a PM like this run for the hills while you still can. Stephen, if you’re reading this, do things differently because nobody is going to believe it and it’s disingenuous to suggest people can make 15k a day.

Update: Normally I just don’t reply to these kinds of posts but as I was writing this blog post, I decided to reply to see what he would come back to me with. My response was quite reasonable where I asserted nobody was making 15k a day and that I didn’t ask for this info.

This was Stephen’s opportunity to ‘be a friend’ or explain why I was mistaken in my assertion that I did not believe 15k a day was being made with whatever it is he wanted to tell me about, but he came up with some nonsense about people complaining about finances. I was going to just ignore the message but he followed this up with “No response??”

Which in my opinion is not only impatient but also a bit aggressive, given that only a couple of minutes had passed. Red flags and alarm bells go off in my head big time when people start sending impatient messages on social media.

Stephen is a man in a hurry and the thing he is chasing is results…

Seeing as Stephen wanted a reply from me I gave him one. I asked him another reasonable question, which was whether he is getting good results cold-pitching to people on Facebook before he knows them. I also asked him how he knows me and whether we had interacted before.

All reasonable questions, wouldn’t you agree?

Less than a minute after sending Stephen this reply he decided it was all too much and blocked me.

I wonder why that was? Only a few short minutes before that he seemed keen to tell me about how I could make 15k a day mining Bitcoin (LOL). Stephen Pacovi – another one to probably avoid doing business with if my experience is anything to go by, dear reader.

Step #3: Once you reply, they usually go straight into a pitch of some description. Some of them won’t even wait that long, they’ll just follow up again not long after, even if you don’t reply, with some reference to a product or service they want to pitch to you. It’s a numbers game to them and again, that’s okay if that’s what they want to do on Facebook.

But what you have in that situation is a pretend Facebook friend adding you to sell you something. There’s no other reason for that person to engage with you and it’s so fake it’s always turned me off the likes of Facebook and until now, social media in general. That’s why I have hardly ever posted on there because as soon as I do, I start getting these PM’s on Facebook and I’ll be honest – I don’t like them and I don’t have time for it because I know how to build an audience without using social media at all.

It’s always good to remain humble and I don’t profess to know everything, but the majority of these people have only been trying to make money online for a few months and here they are dropping me PM’s trying to sell to me like slick snake oil salespeople when they don’t actually know me in any capacity.

Usually I never reply if I sense any kind of pitch coming up. Once again let me be clear, I have no problem with people selling anything on social media, it’s how the vast majority are going about doing it that is a turn-off.

Someone out there is teaching people to do this on Facebook so it’s not necessarily the affiliate marketers fault as they just want to make money and they’ve been told to do things a certain way. If that’s the case then the teacher is to blame.

The fact is this, people love to buy but they hate to be sold to. It’s a bit different if you’re on an email list because you’re expressing your consent and interest to receive emails and you know you’re going to be told about products and services you may be interested in.

On social media other than adding someone as a friend or accepting a friend request there is no-one opting in to receive more information when a person starts pitching their stuff via DM’s before they even know the person or anything about them.

Some understand this of course so they fake interest in the person they’ve just added as a friend in order to set up the pitch which anyone who has been around a while in this game, knows is coming.

There are other ways to get people interested in what it is you have to share/offer and it’s not cold-pitching people in PM’s when they haven’t even asked for any information about the thing they so desperately want you to buy.

With all that being said, as much as I can’t say I’m a raving fan when it comes to Facebook I do like the groups (I think that’s the best thing about FB to be straight with you) and I also am going to start posting on there more so if you want to add me as a friend on there and you are interested in making an income online or connecting, then feel free to do so.

Links as follows: