The easiest and most direct way to get people to join your Ning Network is to invite them. To invite new members, sign in to your Ning Network and go to the Invite tab to invite your friends. You can invite people to join your Ning Network by manually typing in their email addresses, or you can import your contacts from an address book stored with your email provider or on your computer. You can also share an invitation link in an email or on a website.
There are five buttons to choose from for how to invite people to your network. Click on a button to open up this invitation option.
Import from Gmail, Yahoo! or Windows Live: Just click on the service, then click on the “Import” button” to type in the address and the password for your email account — you’ll immediately be able to invite any of your contacts to your Ning Network. Windows Live is Microsoft’s umbrella service, and includes Hotmail email accounts.
Enter Email Addresses: If you have a particular set of email addresses that you want to send invitations to, you can click on the white envelope to enter these email addresses manually in this section. Enter multiple email addresses into the “Send To” field.
Import from Address Book Application: If you are the Network Creator, you can also upload a .vcf or .csv contact file from services like Microsoft Outlook or Apple Address book. Just click on the book icon to access this option. You’ll be able to invite any contacts that you’ve stored here to your Ning Network. This is only an option for Network Creators.
Import from Facebook or LinkedIn: If the Network Creator has enabled Facebook or LinkedIn options, you will additionally be able to invite friends from these services.
To enable the ability for you and your members to invite Facebook friends to your network, go to My Network > Settings > Invitation and drag and drop the Facebook icon into the “Invite Using Other Services” section. If you have already created a Facebook app, you will just need to save your changes for the function to be enabled. If you have not, you’ll be redirected to your Facebook Integration page to get started on creating your Facebook Sharing app.
Once that’s set up, you can invite your Facebook friends by clicking on the Facebook icon and typing in the address and password for your Facebook account. If your friends list doesn’t come up automatically, click on the “Find Facebook Friends” link to connect. Typing into the name field will perform a live search among your friends list. Clicking on the “Invite” button next to any Facebook friend’s name will bring up a pre-populated message that you can edit to add a personalized touch to the invitation.
Please note that in order to prevent spam, Facebook enforces a limit of one invitation at a time, but you can invite as many people, one at a time, as you wish, from your friends list.
The ability to invite your LinkedIn contacts depends on your first having created a LinkedIn app. The app you use for LinkedIn Social Sign In is the same one used for inviting your contacts, but will need a few changes made to an existing app, specifically to the JavaScript API Domain field.
If you have not yet created a LinkedIn app, you’ll be prompted to do so when you drag and drop the LinkedIn icon into the “Invite Using Other Services” section of your Invitation page (found in the Settings section of your dashboard).
Once that’s set up, you can invite your LinkedIn contacts by clicking on the LinkedIn icon and signing in with your LinkedIn account credentials in a new window. This will by default grant the connection until revoked, but you can also click on the “Change” link to alter the connection period to one day, a week or thirty days. If your friends list doesn’t come up automatically, click on the “Find LinkedIn Connections” link to connect. You’ll now be able to invite any of your contacts to your Ning Network.
Please note that LinkedIn enforces a limit of ten invitations per account per day.
If your invitations aren’t being delivered by using the Invite tab, then you may want to ask the members you’ve invited to check their spam folders. Have your members set their spam filters so that emails from Ning.com can reach their inboxes. You might also want to try using the invitation link on your Ning Network, which is available only to the Network Creator and administrators.
You can add a custom message to every invitation you send for a more personal approach.
