It’s great if you have a Facebook for Business Page created for your company that you maintain and manage. But what is the point of having a great social media page if you don’t have any followers to see what you’re posting?
There a couple ways that we recommend to build a Facebook following:
1. Facebook Likes Campaign
As business owners and social media marketers, you should be familiar with all of the various types of Facebook ads that can be used and the different types of advertising objectives they offer.
One particular type of Facebook ad is called a Likes Campaign (which can be found under the Engagement section of the Facebook ad options). This is a paid advertising strategy with the objective of growing the total number of likes that a Facebook page has. This ad is delivered to a target audience that you can define in a specific target location. The targeted ads encourage users to like or follow your Facebook page, which in turn helps your business gain a large following. You will be prompted to set a budget and date range that you will want your ad to run. Since a Facebook Likes Campaign is categorized as an impression ad (distributed based on views), your budget must include a minimum of $1 to be spent per day.
Tips for an effective likes campaign:
- Implement a strong visual
- Target users that are similar to your current customers or are likely to be interested in your product or service
- Briefly explain your company or why a user should follow your page in your ad
Once your ad is up and running, you can then measure its success by checking the number of new page likes the ad has delivered, the amount of money you are paying for each new like, the number of people the ad reached, number of impressions, and more.
2. Improve Your Social Strategy
People will follow pages that post about topics that they are generally interested in. Effective social media management is not necessarily about how often you post, it’s about what and when you post. It’s more effective to spend time creating fewer well-thought-out posts that encourage engagement rather than just posting for the sake of it.
Quick tips for an effective social media post:
- Who is your post targeted at? Create the desired customer personality first and then cater that post to appeal to that target.
- When are you posting? Be sure to post at the right times. You may think of a witty post at 7am on a Saturday morning, but chances are that most of your target audience won’t actually be on Facebook at that time. Use Facebook’s scheduling tools to plan logical times for distributing your social posts.
- Are you prompting engagement? Social media is all about being social. Your posts will spread faster when users engage with them (comment, react, share). Try to inspire some sort of conversation in order to grow your engagement.
- Are you attracting attention? Including an image in a Facebook post increases engagement by 37% and over 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook every day.
3. Boost Your Posts
While creating a Likes Campaign through Facebook Ads is an effective strategy for growing a page’s following within a specific time frame, boosting Facebook posts can also contribute to new page likes.
A Facebook boosted post is a regular social media post that is pushed out to targeted users over a specified amount of time. If you take your time to create high-quality social media posts, then boost them out! You can reach users who do not follow your page which will help bolster brand awareness and grow your social media following. When boosting a post, you will have access to various targeting demographics and can set your own budget and timeframe. Keep in mind that you will need to provide at least $1 per day that you want your post to be boosted.