Getting Higher Friend Acceptance Rate

I have been experimenting with Facebook for about a month now. I started with a 22 million user opt-in email list with name, address, phone, email and in many cases age and sex. I sorted by state (all emails are US based). I picked a random state and geo-targeted a city. Uploaded 4 test files of 2500. Didn't get banned, but only found 5657 users to friend request. Wanting to up my odds I wrote a quick C# app to cycle through the list of emails and "ask" facebook if the emails were connected to an account. Ran my first state through and found 54% of the emails did have a facebook accounts. Started another Fresh FB account and loaded 4 more files of 2500 and this time I sent just over 8k friend invites. The number was so odd that it stood out because each file supposedly had approx 500 there were not accounts. I think I am running into a cap of sorts.

I am all about testing and finding the limits and I feel like I am headed in the right general direction. From the 8 accounts I have populated I am averaging about 8% at best acceptance after the first week. Not at all what I was hoping for. I was hoping for 20% plus.

Currently profiles are not individuals and I have made a point not to put too much of anything on them short of a profile pic. The one I have made a little more effor to make a few comments have performed better and gotten more people to friend request me. Also I have noticed that if my them if female based it does much better any of the others I have tested. Anybody with more experience willing to point me in the right direction to start my next testing? Or am I just being too greedy and hoping for too high a conversion rate?

Females will work better than males, because men are horny, period.
Try not to use a totally unreal profile picture however, a good way to find decent yet not unbelievable pictures to use is from myspace.com using the browse feature, however many will argue that this might be illegal.

Try and send a message to grab their attention with your friend request, eg.
Hey, saw you were cute so i added you
Hey. Do you remember me from high school!?
etc, just lure them in.

I have been currently using the upload contact list option when i first create the account to avoid being banned for submitting 8-15k friend requests all at once. As I can tell there is no way to set a default message to go with them, but I'll look again and that is why profiles to date have been more like <City> Area Nite Life and such. I think it only makes sense to try creating realistic people and give it a try as well. I was just concerned that the rejection would be worse because it would be even less reason to friend them. Nothing like a little testing to answer that. Thanks for the suggestion.

So I use to do work with Facebook Inc, particularly in active user behavior patterns, and can tell you
Usually friend acceptance rates for someone you don't know are 6-10%. If you have a common friend the rate of acceptance is about 15-20%. If you have a direct link (they actually know you) then that number jumps to 40% or higher. Men 18-25 and 26-35 have higher acceptance rates of those appove. Those acceptance rates are even higher for females in the 18-25 catagory. So men 18-35 usually accept women 18-25 about 1/6 times. However, when I was doing more studies, this was quickly becoming saturated and the number was dropping to 1/7. But it depends on what males and how you contact them.

In the first 24 hours, your rate of having a Facebook account disabled is extremely high. If you are rejected by more than 50% of your requests, you are at risk to be disabled. If they report that they don't know you. Requests that are open, usually are fine to 75%. However in the next 48 hours are pretty crucial, if the rate (of that number) is rapidly increasing, your account will be banned. Since the average number of friend requests is about 8 per day, and the deviation of that in the 90th percentile is something like 70, you must stay below 40-50 friend requests to be successful.

Thanks that is exactly the type of research I like to see. The 40-50 friends per day or get banned is a common number I have been seeing. I know I am new to this, but that seems like such a low number to make it seem useless to even waste time doing it to build friends. I am guessing I'm missing something like somehow getting in groups and somehow getting the group members to ask to be your friend? That is the only reasonable way to built large groups as quickly as I see people claim they are doing. I'll start testing that on a few accounts along with testing 40-50 friend requests on a few others.

Also I ran into my first 2 bans. Oddly enough they were on accounts that I seeded with only 1000 "friends" with the upload contact. If I take the info you gave about getting rejected by 50% in first 24 hours then get banned it makes sense to conclude that by seeding much larger groups like 8000 plus betting that half the people will be either too lazy, not care, or not all log in within the 24 hours verse a smaller group of only 1000. I must be starting to get noticed by facebook because today I got my first phone verify requirement to create an account. I need to be less sloppy and remember to delete all temp internet files. I plan to install cc cleaner I keep seeing on these forums.

I don't know how many accounts your working with but I would suggest a number less than 40 for friend requests. I suggest a number half to about 25 friend requests. Facebook, when they encounter a number of accounts that are abusive, has a in-house custom way of linking certain accounts by behavior and IP address then banning them. After 72 hours, you may see a large number of accounts get banned as being deemed abusive.

I think I am a bit unclear on your mission but if you want people to friend you, there's easy ways to go about it.

My mission is to build 30-40 friend accounts with approx 5k friends that I can use to build out fan pages, sell invites, sell updates, and experiment with CPA offeres. My most current problem is trying to find the most effective methods to get friends. I read posts with people talking about getting 3-4k friends in just a day. After a month of testing I can only imagine they are sending friend requests from another account. I am more interested in learning how to aquire geo-targeted friends to particular city which will be a lot more valuable to my future goals. Other than directly asking people to be your friend approx 20-40 a day depends on who you ask, there has be be a better way to get friends. Like I said in a previous post my best guess has to do with joining groups and just asking in group for people to be your friend in a post, but that seems too easy and spammy to work. If there is a better way or a different direction I should be looking I greatly appreciate any advice.

Yes there are very good methods people use and remain under the radar with Facebook. But there is one very important thing I always remind people and that is Facebook never forgets. They log info and store it, even stuff they won't use right now but something possible to implement in the future. The thing is, each Facebook account is compared to an average of users. The higher you are above the averages, and other click behavior you exhibit could be considered as abusive and result in a disabled account.

Geo-targeted friends are much easier to get than a diverse field. The acceptance rates for people with some sort of network relationship is relatively high (compared to another). I'd advice against asking people to be friends but rather look like casual activity. There are some very effective methods on getting people in groups, fan pages. PM me if you wish.

A very interesting thread.

I too am trying to build up as many friends as possible but I am struggling like the op is, but all of fb's anti spam measures make it very difficult, but i'm getting there slowly!

:tronlegacy, I would be most grateful if you could message me with some of your friend adding methods

Tron has some great tips about facebook since he used to work there
great consultation offers, REALLY improved my facebook marketing 10x