This is a guest post by my good friend Roger James Hamilton – Creator of the Wealth Dynamics profiling system. In today’s blog, Roger shares his insights on Facebook success strategies…which one is yours?

THE ‘BLAZE’ STRATEGYWealth Dynamics and Facebook

I met Mari Smith at an event in Las Vegas in 2008. She took my Wealth Dynamics profile test and came out as a Supporter. This was no surprise to her as she loved people, and connecting came naturally. Mari had just begun coaching people on how to use Facebook.

She kept focused at building her brand, keeping up with the latest changes in Facebook, serving her customers, connecting directly and answering questions daily. Her consistent presence and daily activity made her a trusted source of information and advice.

By the beginning of 2012, she had over 62,000 fans on her Facebook Fan page and another 140,000+ subscribers to her personal Facebook page. 14,000 people registered for a webinar she ran at the end of January 2012, where she launched her training program “Extreme Fanbase Growth.”

Mari’s story is inspirational. It shows that you don’t need to build a big company to grow a global business anymore. You don’t need a big corporate brand when you have a trusted personal brand. Should you be inspired by Mari’s story? Yes!

Should you try and copy her strategy? That depends!

Wealth Dynamics has 8 profiles following a mix of 4 strategies. Mari’s strategy is a typical “Blaze” strategy. It works brilliantly for Supporters who love daily connection, building and giving loyalty, and responding to their network. In good times and tough times, Mari gets pleasure out of interacting with her network.

For other profiles, such a high level of interaction would be tiring. So what other options are there for success with Facebook?

THE ‘DYNAMO’ STRATEGY

Alex Bernstein spent four seasons in the NFL as an offensive linesman. Naturally creative, he started a company called Echo to consult to companies on their digital marketing and then worked for Virgin Digital in business development. If he had followed a path similar to Mari, he could have built a personal brand on Facebook and sold his expertise in digital marketing.

But Alex isn’t the kind of guy to be in communication each day with large numbers of people. It would have been too much like hard work.

Instead, in 2010 soon after Facebook Pages launched, he saw the need for easy ways that companies could build their brands. He launched ‘North Social’ to build tools that companies could use to promote and manage themselves on Facebook. As a Creator profile, he saw more value in building products than building his personal brand.

Within a year, the company’s Facebook apps were being used by 1,300 organisations. The company had built enough momentum that Alex sold North Social to marketing software company, Vocus for $25 million, with $7 million in cash and $18 million based on the next two years performance, which he is in the middle of right now.

Alex is not a techie, but he is a Creator. This is an example of a Dynamo strategy, for those who are naturally better and building products and businesses. In fact, Mari in her Blaze strategy is happy to promote Facebook Apps from all different companies as they support her network.

This is the power of being clear on your profile. By doing one thing well, you become of value to all the other profiles that are doing their thing well. Your value becomes their leverage.

Those are two very different strategies on Facebook, on the top and right of the Wealth Dynamics square. What about the Tempo strategy at the bottom and the Steel strategy to the right?

THE ‘TEMPO’ STRATEGY

Jack Nickell was a struggling art student in Chicago when he entered an online T-shirt design competition and got his friends to vote for him. He won $1,000 prize money, so used it to start up Threadless, a community which would let artists submit their T-shirt designs that people could vote for.

Jack is a Trader profile which means he’s sensory, values his friendships but frankly would rather others do the creation while he manages the transactions.

The Tempo strategy that Jack followed was reactive to the market (the opposite to the Dynamo strategy of giving the market a product they didn’t know they needed until they saw it). As he says, “So many of the decisions that we’ve made in the company in the last ten years have been things I never could have predicted.

And since we’re a community-driven company, I can’t sit here and say, “this is what our community is going to want.” The one thing I know that we will be doing in the next ten years is listening to them.”

In Facebook, Jack saw a way to mould it to suit Threadless. He doesn’t market his personal brand or sell marketing apps. Instead, he uses it to empower the Threadless community. Their Fan Page lets designers enter contests, lets participants ‘like’ their favourites, so voting is done through the Facebook system.

You can buy the T-Shirts with the winning designs, see the artist leader board and join the latest Threadless Meet up in your local city.

Today, Threadless has 85,000 artists submitting 300,000 designs, and 1.2 million participants voting. Their Facebook page features meetups in over 100 cities around the world, and has over 410,000 fans.

When you see the Wealth Dynamics square as the four seasons in every cycle, it is no surprise that we are now seeing the Steel strategy (which is the winter strategy) begin to emerge. Every new technology goes through the same cycle where it begins with the creative, early adopters (Dynamo / Spring), moves to the influential leaders (Blaze / Summer), then co-ordinated transactions (Tempo / Autumn) and finally automated systems (Steel / Winter).

THE ‘STEEL’ STRATEGY

Rajat Garg lives in New Delhi, India. He trained as an engineer and then worked at a series of companies in product management. Rajat is a Mechanic profile, which means he looks at everything as a system, and is always trying to improve on it.

One year ago, in 2011, he thought that there must be a simpler way for Facebook users to organise themselves. He set up a company, SocialAppsHQ, to offer a full suite of Facebook apps for business. The difference between Rajat and Alex Bernstein, is that Alex saw his business expertise and connections as being as important as the technology.

For Rajat, it was all about automated technology. The more it could grow automatically without him needing to speak to anyone, the better!

Rajat created simple plugins that can be automatically installed from within Facebook, tailored to industries like real estate, restaurants, hotels and retail. In the first year, over 650,000 fan pages have installed his apps, including Intel, PayPal, Stanford University and many brand names. Rajat has achieved all of this from Delhi, with a small team, doing what he loves – building a better system.

These are four very different strategies for success:

Dynamo’ Strategy – Your natural strength is creative, you create a product or business, you leverage on the social talents of others.

Blaze’ Strategy – Your natural strength is social, you connect daily to build a strong personal brand, you leverage on the products of others.

‘Tempo’ Strategy – Your natural strength is service, you enable others to connect around a cause, and you turn connections to transactions.

Steel’ Strategy – Your natural strength is analysis, you create a system that the other three can use, adding efficiency to effectiveness.

Each of the eight profiles has one or a mix of two strategies to follow which is natural for them. Which one is natural to you?

About Roger Hamilton

Roger is a social entrepreneur living in Bali, with businesses in Singapore, Australia and UK. Eight years ago he asked the question “What could a committed group of people achieve by focusing on collectively increasing their power to create and contribute?” This led to what is today XL Nation, a network of Social Entrepreneurs connected across 30 countries.

Wealth Dynamics was created in 2002 by Roger, and has grown to become the No.1 Profiling test for Entrepreneurs. The test is available online, and has recently led to the launch of the Wealth Spectrum, which divides each of the eight profiles further into nine levels of entrepreneurial experience and expertise.

Visit the Wealth Dynamics website here