How to get more Facebook Fans

If you are throwing a party don’t skimp on the invitations

Advertise. We are in the middle of a Facebook advertising campaign that has brought us a bunch of great fans at a reasonable price.  Because Social Media is perceived as “free” advertising, many companies are hesitant to spend any money on advertising.  Many companies choose to grow their fan base by giving away an iPad.  Unless you are an electronics store this will likely attract of lot of fans that are not potential customers.  Usually it is better to put that money into advertising that can be more geared towards your target market.  As a B2B company with a limited ability to target small business owners on Facebook we still decided to advertise and here is why.

• Perceived popularity – As a company that offers social media consulting it was particularly important that we increase our page likes, but for any type of business people take notice of your number of likes.  More likes makes the company look more reputable and popular.  In order to grow your Facebook likes we have also found that people are more inclined to click “like” if they are #230 than if they are #23.  It’s like a party and no one wants to be the first one there.
• Content Exposure – If you have a blog you may spend a lot of time coming up with note worthy content.  If you are working on an SEO campaign, many of your blog posts may be “link bait” in the hopes that someone will link to your post and help your website rank better in Google.  There is no way to pay for blog followers, but you can pay for Facebook fans.  A larger fan base will give you a much wider audience for your posts, which means more links and blog readers.  Its ironic how paying for Facebook advertising can help you rank better in organic Google results.
• Exponential growth – The goal of most social media campaigns is to take advantage of the easy sharing on Facebook.  If someone likes or shares your post, their connections will see the activity and may start following you as well.  In the best case scenarios your content will go viral and be viewed by millions.  Following this logic, the start of your social media campaign will be extremely slow.  If only 10 people are notified of the new article, the pool of their potential connections is exponentially smaller than if you notified 100 people.  For this reason it makes a lot of sense to advertise at the beginning of your campaign to jump start your fan base and accelerate the growth of the campaign.
• Affordability – After the first week we averaged about $1 per like.  So we spent $90 and gained 90 Facebook likes.  If we advertised on Google adwords we might have paid $2-$3 per website visit.  Although the chances of someone contacting us immediately after clicking on a Google ad are greater than someone clicking on a Facebook ad, we have the ability to keep in touch with our Facebook likes.  If you publish interesting content on your Facebook page, a Facebook like will be more valuable than one shot at converting the potential customer on a website.

What you need for a successful Facebook ad campaign

• Facebook landing page to send your ads.  Here is our tutorial on how to create a Facebook landing page.
• A good set of Facebook ads.  Here is how to set up a basic Facebook ad campaign.  We will also be coming out with a series of posts on successful and failed Facebook ads.