Your contacts outside Facebook may be a gold mine of people who would benefit from your Business Page. With the help of the Invite Email Contacts dialog box, you can import the contact info for all the folks you know into a space where you can invite them to your Page.
There are a few things to note about this process:
Only Admins of Pages with fewer than 5,000 likes can import their e-mail lists and invite people on those lists to like their Page, so invite your e-mail contacts before you reach that number.
Facebook imports your contact file securely. Then you can suggest your Page to your contacts.
If you use Gmail, for example, you need to export your contacts in CSV (comma-separated values) format and then upload the CSV file to Facebook.
To import your contacts, go to the Admin panel, and click Build Audience to access the drop-down menu; next, click the Invite Email Contacts link. Doing so brings up the Invite Email Contacts dialog box.
The idea here is that you can either upload a contacts file you put together yourself or have Facebook search your iCloud, Skype, Windows Live, Hotmail, and AOL accounts to find people for you to contact who are already on Facebook. When you click the Invite Contacts link next to any of those services, you need to type your e-mail address and password, and then click the Find Contacts button.
To help you create a contacts file to upload, Facebook has created instructions specific to whichever mail system you use. When you click the Other Email Service link and type a Gmail address, for example, Facebook presents instructions for exporting your Gmail contacts in a file that Facebook can use.
Then you can select the people you want to invite to your Page. The preview depicts how the invitation looks to those whose e-mail address matches a personal Facebook account, as you can see at the top; the bottom shows how it would look if it were sent to an e-mail address that isn’t associated with a Facebook account.
For users who are already on Facebook, this invitation shows up on the right side of their News Feed as an invitation from your Page. If users don’t have a Facebook account, they get an e-mail suggesting that they join Facebook so that they can like your Page.
Facebook puts Page invitations in a fairly obscure place. No one knows to go there, but Facebook has a very nice section on the right side called Page Invites with all the invitations that have been sent to you. Currently, it’s the best place to go to see those invitations. Spread the word.
