The Pitfalls of Guerrilla Marketing and Automatically Adding Friends to Facebook Groups

What you need to be aware of when you add friends to your Facebook group without their permission and how it can harm your business reputatio

As an entrepreneur, sometimes it’s hard to know who to listen to and trust with marketing advice.

On one hand, you’ve got the Guerrilla Marketers who have the “push” marketing mentality and then on the other hand, the Content Marketers who have the “pull” marketing mentality.

Each have their own specific strategies they use to build a business and many times, these strategies are completely opposite from each other.

No wonder the online marketing world is so confusing!

One strategy I’ve been seeing some Guerrilla Marketers teach (and entrepreneurs implement) is to create Facebook groups and then automatically add all of their friends into them.

These friends did not ask to join the group, instead, they are automatically added into the group whether they have given permission or not. Indeed, there are scripts that people use to do this in bulk.

The reason for this strategy is two-fold:

* You can create a group and if you have a large friend list, the group can be full of members right off the bat. This makes the group appear to be very popular due to the high number of members.

* When doing Facebook ads, you can target the members of that group to promote your product or service.

To an “inbound” or “pull” marketer like me, this strategy doesn’t make any sense.

The reason being is that you’re working with a game of numbers – get thousands of people into a group they didn’t purposefully join and hope that some will stick and participate in the discussions and ultimately buy from you.

But the “pull” marketing strategy is completely opposite to this. It’s strategy is to offer valuable content to your ideal target market and the right people who are more apt to purchase from you will naturally be drawn to you and your services.

During this process, you’re developing a “know, like and trust” factor with them. The more someone knows, likes and trust you, the more likely they are to doing business with you or tell their friends about you.

So when you are being torn in different directions on which strategy to implement to help build your business, think about how you want to approach your marketing efforts.

Do you want to push your wares on people through aggressive promotional tactics or do you want to pull people into your business by sharing your expertise?

If you choose the Guerrilla route and implement, as an example, a strategy to create Facebook groups and automatically add your friends to that group without them being aware, then just know that you face a high probability of angering these friends.

myself have been automatically added to groups many times and it annoys the heck out of me! And I know I’m not the only one.

Do a Google search and see how many times the question is posted, “How do I prevent people from automatically adding me to their Facebook group” and ask yourself if this the best way to promote your business?

Is this how you want your business to be perceived as? Yes, these tactics might just work but to what detriment? They may work short term but if you are in business for the long haul, consider the ramifications of doing such things and how they can harm your business reputation.

Another example is automatically adding people to your newsletter list. But that’s another article!

If you are interested in learning more about “pull” marketing strategies, I invite you to check out my low-cost monthly membership program called Social Blast: eMarketing for Entrepreneurs where each month I cover a topic in social media or online marketing methods that will help you attract your ideal clients in a non-aggressive way.

What do you feel about this subject? Have you ever had someone automatically add you to a Facebook group without your permission? How did you feel about it and what did you do?