Old Busted Hotness

Do you know what a Facebook ladder is? No? Well, until about a month ago, I didn’t either. Basically, it’s a way to promote your fan or business page by liking others’ pages and having them return the favor, all in a somewhat organized chaos.  Here’s how they work.

There are Facebook pages specifically dedicated to hosting ladders. When a ladder is advertised, you like that page and then you like other pages as instructed. When you get to the bottom, you tag your page and hope for the best.

I’ve been doing these for about a month now in an attempt to build my Ms. Atlantic City page. I’m not selling anything, just building an audience for a proposal I want to make in the near future. Has it helped? Yes, it has. Is it a lot of work? Yes, it is.

Ladders DO work, so I’m going to give you some tips and tricks I’ve learned over the last month.

1. Read the instructions carefully before clicking anything! They are basically the same, but there are subtle differences. For instance, some sites only want you to like a comment if you are a new fan, not if you are what they call an AAF or “already a fan.” Some want you to like all comments.
2. Now that you’ve read the instructions, follow them! These ladders are watched pretty closely, from what I can see. If you drop your tag and run or simply don’t follow the instructions they’ve posted, you will be banned.
3. Watch the timing!  Again, read the instructions. If you see a “15-minute ladder” posted 14 minutes ago, you won’t get much out of it if you’re at the bottom. Wait for the next ladder to post. It’s better being near the top.
4. Watch for the closed sign.  At the end of a ladder, a host will usually put something like “Ladder now closed” with some graphics to catch your attention. If you keep going after that sign, the others don’t have to like you.
5. Don’t do the ladders on holidays. People are home, but they’re not thinking ladder. . . they’re thinking family fun. Wait until the regular business week begins again and you’ll have much more success.
6. If people come on the ladder after you, they may like your page and send you a message that they’ve done so and offer their page for return like love.  Make sure you do this and answer that message, every single time. You don’t want to get a reputation for not returning the love.

How do you find these ladders? There are hundreds of them, probably thousands. You can put “networking ladder” (no quotes) in the Facebook search window and you’ll get a bunch.  Here are a few of the more successful ones for me that you can try. How do I know? When folks leave me those messages, they usually tell me where they came from. 😉

• The Cosmos Ladder  (Fairly new, but taking off well!)
• Promote Your Small Business
• Promocii
• The Cat’s Meow Network
• Hot Deals of the Day (another new one that’s building)

You’ll find that as you hit like on the ladders, you’ll see more and more ladders so you will build your stock of ladders to try very quickly.

A lot of the larger ladder services also offer “paid likes,” meaning they’ll feature you on the links everyone must like OR you pay for so many guaranteed likes.  You’ll have to check the individual pages for what packages they’re offering.

Way back up top I said I was doing this to build an audience. But what if you sell things? Well, most people DO sell something on a biz page and there are tons of similar biz pages out there for the various direct sales plans. However, it’s a numbers game. The more folks like your page, the more orders you will get when they want to purchase.  I have a lot more “stuff” in my news feed now, but I’ve found several fascinating businesses and have made lots of new friends.

So. . . if you want to build your FB page, jump on that ladder and start climbing!