Growing Your Mafia

Initially, this seems like the hardest part unless you're reallyexperienced with these kinds of games or 'applications' on socialnetworking sites. To go out and recruit people into your mafia quickly and successfully, follow the steps here and your mafia will be huge in no time.

 There are many different methods to recruit but to keep it simple I will suggest a few here:

 Invite all your existing network friends to play. This is easy because the application has a built-in feature to do this, however, it's limited because the application needs to cooperate with the social network website and not spam.

 To overcome the limitations imposed by the built-in feature of the application, you need to get your recruiting link and go out and invite your friends individually. This will actually bring MORE of your friends into your mafia than by using the automated features. Take a minute and craft your personalized invitation message for your friends. Tell them that even if they don't want to play, you benefit by them simply accepting the invitation. You want your mafia to be huge in numbers so even the people who never use applications but accept to be in your mafia will speed the game along for you. Some of the least expected friends can turn into your strongest mafia bosses so invite everybody.

Send your personalized invitation via the private message feature. Don't try to send to everybody too fast because you don't want

Myspace or Facebook to kick in its anti-spam defenses. Send a

message every few minutes until you've invited your best friends.

Try to pick the most active members first as they'll be most likely to

accept and play the game with you.

Use forums to recruit super players

In Mafia Wars, you need at least six players in your mafia who are totally addicted to the game and will reach the higher levels. These are the players you want to put into your 'top mafia' by promoting them to be your wheelman, your safecracker, etc. When you promote players who are further along in the game, you get bigger rewards in jobs and fights.

To find these people, go to the "Apps" directory on Facebook.

In the Search Applications box, enter 'Mafia Wars'. The first and best one is by Zynga, the one we're talking about here.

Go ahead and click it. It will take you to the application's home page. What's interesting is that there is a discussion board on this page. It's where you'll see people asking and answering questions about the game. It's a good place to hang out if you have doubts, but the best part is that this is where players post to recruit members into their mafia.

Use other social sites to recruit existing players. If you're playing on Myspace, go to Facebook to recruit players into your Myspace mafia, and if you're playing on Facebook, look for the players on Myspace to recruit into your Facebook mafia. The app also runs on Yahoo, so look for players using the Yahoo version. One thing you can do is create a free blog about your personal 'mafia' experiences. Go to http://blogger.com and create a blog dedicated exclusively to your mafia. Write on it daily at first, and be sure to include 'keywords' related to mafia wars that will help other players find your blog. You should customize your blog sidebar to display your recruiting link prominently. If you don't know what to blog about, just Google some info about mafia wars and you'll be able to get ideas.

Write up a blog post about "Mafia Wars Cheats" and tell people they'll get a bonus by adding you to their mafia. I've seen other people doing this and while they aren't winning any real friends, they sure have big mafias… I've seen similar methods using video sites like YouTube and Metacafe as well. These are people who promise players a hidden bonus if they add such-and-such person to their mafia. It's not very honest unless you give some of your collection items to these people, in which case it's completely honest and I encourage you to make those kinds of promises. Otherwise, just make Mafia Wars Cheat Secrets or something like that the title of your video to get views but just refer people to your blog or recruiting link. You can also use Twitter to recruit on automatic pilot. What you do is go to http://tweetlater.com and create a free account. You will also already need an active Twitter account to use this. What you do is once you've created your account, go to "Manage My Scheduled Tweets and Twitter Account Automation." Click the box that says "Auto Welcome" and enter either your blogger blog or your mafia recruiting link into the message box. It can only be 120 characters so consider a URL shortening site like Tiny Url to make the recruiting URL small enough that you can still add a little blurb of text inviting. Remind people they have to add you as a friend too! You can do searches on Twitter so search for mafia wars and start adding all the people who have anything to say about it. TweetLater will automatically send your recruiting message to the people that follow you back. You can do this to hundreds of Twitter users each day, but don't go overboard because Twitter also has anti-spam measures built-in to prevent users from abusing the service. Create multiple Twitter accounts if you want, you only need one TweetLater account for multiple Twitter accounts though.

What you do is add all of these people who are posting for more mafia members to your own mafia. You add them as a friend and I recommend you include a personal message at the time of adding saying something like "for mafia wars" or just paste your recruiting link in there so they know you're not a stalker and want to play the game with them. There's no limit to how much you can do this, and it's the fastest way to build a supercharged mafia. it's important to recruit early in the game because the best way to get cash flow going (in order to get stronger weapons and vehicles)

is to buy "Mafia Mike's" property. It's cheap and offers awesome cash flow. You need it in order to get those Tommy Guns necessary for completing jobs and defending yourself. Recruit like crazy and your mafia will be gigantic. The limit at the time of this writing is 500, but you can get there quickly by using this forum recruiting tactic ALONE!!!

Do both adding people from the forum and post your own little ad for recruiting. You can also post in the 'Review' section but tell people to add you as a friend to invite to the game since the review section doesn't allow you to post your recruiting link. The comment section does though so feel free to post it there at least once a day, maybe even once every four or five hours even since there are so many postings there.