1. Facebook - importing clients from vpc and adding them as friends<br />Keeping up with clients on a relational level is being pushed more and more to the social media scene. With this mild tutorial, you can easily add all of your clients in VPC as friends on Facebook. Later on, you can then suggest your Fan Page to each of these client-friends. <br />To start, log into VPC, then in the navigation bar on the left, click on Reports, Custom Reports, and then 'Create New Custom Report'.<br />At the next screen, we need to create the report itself that will give us a .csv or Excel file containing all of our clients' info. Name the report whatever you like (here I named it quot;
all activequot;
). Then under quot;
Step 1: Select Your Fieldquot;
, choose quot;
Cityquot;
; under quot;
Step 2: Select The Operatorquot;
, select quot;
Not equal toquot;
; and under quot;
Step 3: Enter Your Valuequot;
, type in quot;
FFFquot;
. Let me explain what the purpose of this is: The VPC Custom Reports require that you enter a rule to screen all clients against when generating a report. We're going to pull all clients that don't have the city quot;
FFFquot;
(a non-existent city name) listed in their records. ...This is basically a lazy way to pull all clients. (Hey, it works, right?!) Then on the far right of the page, click 'Save'. <br />After that, click on 'Show Report'.<br />This will open up an Excel file for you to Open or Save. I advise you save it. Here comes the mildly tricky part that requires some base knowledge of Excel: <br />Delete all columns to the right of the eMail column. <br />Facebook can't deal with spreadsheets with more then 2,ooo contacts, so you need to cut this list into 2,ooo-contact segments and save each one as a separate file. <br />When saving each file, save as a .csv filetype. <br />Right-o. Once you've got each of those .csv files saved, you're ready for Facebook. Go ahead and log into Facebook as the user that will be adding all of these friends.[note]: My general rule is this: Agencies should have a profile account under the name of the agency owner to interact with their clients. This can (and often should) be separate from any personal account the agency owner may already have, and this account can actually be run by the agency's blogger. <br />Once you've logged in, scroll down to the verrry bottom of the page and click quot;
Find Friendsquot;
. <br />After that, click on quot;
Upload Contact Filequot;
as shown below. <br />Then you'll scroll down a wee bit and click on 'Browse' to select your .csv file. At this point in time, assuming you did indeed split up the Excel file into multiple files, take note that you'll need to repeat this process for each file you want to upload.<br />Once you've selected a file, Facebook will lag for a bit. It takes some time to meander through 2,ooo cells of data and amass an eMail list. Facebook will check its records and pull out any members whose eMail addresses you submit. (This number will be markedly smaller than the number of clients you actually put forth, since not every client has a Facebook account, or they may be operating Facebook under a different eMail address.) <br />Once the following page comes up, just click on the box labeled quot;
Select All Friendsquot;
, and click quot;
Add As Friendsquot;
at the bottom. <br />Following this, you have an opportunity to invite all non-Facebook members whose eMail addresses you've submitted...personally, I prefer to skip this step, as this seems a bit of an overstepping of one's bounds as an agency owner. Take advantage of the platforms a client uses...don't force them to change their lifestyle to fit your marketing desires. <br />Kudos! You've requested friendship with each of these chaps! <br />Now, when they message you and ask why the deuce you've friend requested them, look'em up on VPC, see what kind of policy they have with you, then reply with something along the lines of quot;
Why hello! I'm your insurance agent. It looks like you have your x policy with us, and I just wanted to take the opportunity to reach out and establish a firmer network.quot;
<br />