Having a strong Facebook fan page is one of the most important things that you can have for your business if you are serious about Social Media Marketing. Many people start a Facebook fan page for their business, but often get discouraged, lose focus and give up out of frustration when their efforts of creating a fan page goes nowhere.
Most people mistakenly believe that if you put up a Facebook page button, people will flock to your page and you will instantly have tons of fans. That does work in some rare cases, but most of the time a Facebookfan page takes time, hard work and skill to build up.
Below are four tips for growing your facebook fan page:
1) Offer incentives – People always want to get something for nothing. You can offer a few different things depending on your page from contest prizes to discounts off of product or even free samples. When people have the chance to win something or get a freebie, they will often times tell their friends about your page and you get some word of mouth advertising.
If you are going to offer incentives, I would suggest using FBML (Facebook’s HTML version) and creating a tab as a landing page that shows your offer, this will increase your CTR and grow your page more quickly.
2) Team up with larger pages – After interacting with your fans for a while, you will get to know some of them, and you may find that some of them own similar pages or ones that you could work with to expand yours. Offer these people some deals to cross promote your page, you might be surprised at how many take it.
One example of doing this would be a restaurant in say St Louis, they could find the owners of larger St. Louis pages, perhaps the chamber or some individual with a website about the city, getting them to promote your page is a fast way to increase your fan count while reaching your targeted audience still.
3) Facebook Ads – Facebook ads are a great way to increase your page size, when buying ads, I always recommend that people have the ads link to their fan page and not their home page.
If someone goes to your home page and leaves, you get nothing, if they go to your fan page, they will usually click like, and then you get to keep contact with them through your page for as long as they stay a fan.
One thing to note is that Facebook ads CAN get expensive if they aren’t done properly or aren’t watched closely, carefully monitor your ads or employ someone who is experienced to do this for you.
4) Interact regularly – This is probably one of the most important steps, interact regularly with your fans. Doing this will keep you in their minds, and when they need your service or your offering, you will be the first person they think of.
Depending on the page, I would say update your Facebook Fan page least twice a week, but for most pages daily is ideal if possible. I have seen some pages that ignore this all together, and never provide updates, and to me that is the biggest waste of what can be a very valuable advertising tool.
These tips are a great start on increasing your Facebook presence. Facebook now has over 500 million users, and you will want to get your product in front of as many of their eyes as possible.
I have had Facebook pages for websites that can generate 10k unique visitors in a single day with a few updates and you can get your page to that same level of success with a little determination and a lot of hard work!
Image Credit: Buzznights
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