Cyber Dust is a secure chat application that I have been using for a while now and have personally invited many of my friends, family, and business partners to use. Many people say they don’t need a secure chat application because they “stand behind their words”. Hey, let me tell you I stand behind mine as well! It’s just that if I have a private conversation with someone I’d also like for both of our sakes for it to remain private. Without a secure messaging application like Cyber Dust that is just not possible as we have all seen with various highly publicized hacks in 2014 from the iCloud picture releases to the most recent Sony hack. So as I have invited my friends they have begun to ask me about how to get more friends on Cyber Dust so I put together the following list of 10 ways I have used to add more Cyber Dust friends:
- Start with the built-in invite functionality included with Cyber Dust. You get there by clicking on the more button on the footerbar. You then get the option of inviting via email, SMS, FaceBook, Twitter, and some manual invite choices. These leverage your phone’s contacts various ways to make it super easy to invite your friends. This is definitely the best way to add those users that you communicate the most frequently with moving them over to Cyber Dust.
- Another built-in option that is great for adding friends is to press the friends button on the footerbar and choose Popular Users. There you can start by clicking on CD Chatters at the top and add people with similar interests as you. After that, you can walk down the list of popular/high profile accounts like musicians, sports/athletes, entertainers, and more.
- Another excellent way to add friends is to ask some existing Cyber Dust users to ask their followers to follow you. This isn’t something you should immediately do but you can definitely do that after getting to know someone a bit so they can make sure they are comfortable asking people to add you. Cyber Dust is a very active networking community so this is something that many users are willing to do to help the community grow. A related way to get more friends is to add friends that the people you are currently following blast out about (helping them also expands your network).
- Be active on Cyber Dust and be sure to respond to all the blasts you can with something that is meaningful. This will help you make more friends with other active users on Cyber Dust and will expand your network naturally over time.
- You can also watch the various cyberdust accounts on twitter looking at their followers (specifically people that follow them). It’s hit or miss but many users on Cyber Dust will use their twitter username in Cyber Dust as well. So you can search the followers of @cyberdust, @cyberdustapp, etc. This is a relatively random way to add friends but it does work approximately 10-15% of the time.
- Search twitter looking for “cyberdust” or a more advanced search like “cyberdust.com/addme” which is what I use for twitter specifically to find the newest users on Cyber Dust and to welcome them plus add them as friends. I also usually will try to connect with them on Twitter as well.
- You can also search FaceBook, LinkedIn, and other social media sites via Google or Bing/Yahoo. You do this by going to Google or Bing and executing this advanced search: site:facebook.com “cyberdust.com/addme” you can then execute the following for LinkedIn: site:linkedin.com “cyberdust.com/addme”. If you are clever, my guess is you can come up with other sites to search this way for more users.
- You can manually invite more users from gmail by exporting your contacts over to Excel and then inviting 500 users at a time via the gmail web client (or any other email program that you like to use to send out emails). Be sure to use BCC so you aren’t exposing all of your email contacts to each other. Here is a short video showing you how to do the export from gmail:
[youtube id=phu9kN9ZvHE ] - Believe it or not word of mouth is another great way to spread Cyber Dust. Tell your friends about it and why you think it is important. Many of them may already be using snapchat so switching over to Cyber Dust should be pretty easy. I am convinced that Cyber Dust is far more professional than snapchat after getting to know many of the users.
- Finally, you can run ads if you want to add more people and are okay with spending some money. This is easiest to do on Twitter as you can create an ad that includes your Cyber Dust user ID and then target all of the existing followers of all of the Cyber Dust accounts. This is going to cost you some money and you may or may not find success but it is another option that you can explore. You can try ads on other social networks as well targeting friends, followers, etc.
NOTE: As with any network (online or offline), it’s not about how many friends or followers you can get. It is about real engagement and networking with people that you can mutually provide value to. I would encourage you to not shoot for bulk, but for substance. There are many great users on Cyber Dust and all of us want to keep it that way (social networking free from trolls).
If you want to get more information about Cyber Dust you can go to http://www.cyberdust.com or just download it directly on your mobile device via the Google Play store or iTunes. As always, if you end up jumping on Cyber Dust send me a dust at +kenneymyers and let me know what you think.
UPDATE
Here are some ideas that came from other Dusters:
- Make sure to add your Cyber Dust URL and user ID to all of your email signatures. Something like the best way to get in contact with me is via Cyber Dust. You can find out more at http://www.cyberdust.com/addme?kenneymyers or install Cyber Dust and follow kenneymyers.
- Be sure to add your Cyber Dust information on all of your social profiles as well whether it is LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook, or any other networking site. I would recommend adding both the URL http://www.cyberdust.com/addme?kenneymyers and your Cyber Dust ID kenneymyers.
- There are other searches you can run in twitter like #cyberdust or cyberdust user. I am sure you can come up with some more of youre own.
- If you have more ideas, please share them in the comments or better yet hit me up on Cyber Dust.