How To Grow Your Facebook Business Page Following

July 9, 2014

Most people who are just starting their business or fan page face the problem of having none or just a few people who like their pages in the beginning. The challenge becomes how to populate a pretty empty Facebook business page. If you have a fan page, presumably you have some fans somewhere that you can invite to like your Facebook page. The situation is much trickier for business pages.

There are a few strategies for how to begin populating a new Facebook business page. This is where you should fully examine the worth of a large Facebook business page presence. Ask yourself whether this is something that will be truly beneficial to your business because there is a real cost to focusing on this.

If you decide to go ahead and focus on building a large Facebook business page, the costs are your time, efforts, and money that you spend on this (either paying for likes or hiring any staff to help you), actually paying for Facebook ads, and an additional important cost that is easy to not notice. That cost is the use of people’s attention that you use to invite them to your Facebook group. Getting people’s attention is not easy. As a business, you spend a lot of time and effort trying to get that attention. When you do get it, you typically hold a typical person’s attention for mere few seconds. You must decide whether telling that person to go like your page on Facebook, and all the benefits you can get out of that, trumps whatever else you may be able to get that person to do. Other things you may suggest are to buy something from you, give you their email address, follow you on any other social network, or do any other kind of action. Getting a person to like your page on Facebook is just one of many options you have to suggest to them. The decision of what action you want any particular person to do is yours. Put a considerable amount of thought into this action.

If you do decide that growing a large Facebook presence is a priority for your business, the first thing to do is to invite some of your existing Facebook friends who want to stay in touch with what your business does, to like your business page. You can do that with a simple status update on your personal Facebook profile by posting a link to your business page and inviting people to keep in touch with you there as well. That will give you a few initial people in your business page. You can also specifically invite individuals to your page with personal invitations. Personal invitations typically convert at a higher rate because people appreciate that you took the time to personally invite them. Plus, many people just don’t respond to mass invites. It is important to have some initial number of people who like your page because you don’t want your page to look like a ghost town because no one else will like it. You want your group to look like it has lots of activity. That is why inviting the initial few friends can help get things started.

The next thing to do is make status updates on your other social networks to get people who already follow you on other social networks to follow you on Facebook.

Additionally, on your website, when you add social media sharing buttons, you have a choice of whether to add “share” or “like” buttons. Like buttons will obviously get people to like something. You can get people to like your business page and grow your Facebook following that way. On the other hand, if you choose to add the share button instead of the like button, when people share, it will show that to their Facebook friends by making that share visible on their feeds. If the person who shares your page has hundreds or thousands of Facebook friends, you can get exposure to all those people with that single share. Here again, we see the importance of the decision of whether you want to build a following on Facebook with likes, or whether you want to do something else that might be more beneficial. This decision will follow you to almost all other marketing strategies you choose moving forward.

Thus far we discussed common sense strategies to populate your new Facebook business page. These strategies are easy to implement and it is good to do them quickly and get them out of the way. Next set of strategies is more complicated and requires more effort.

Every business should be trying to get press coverage and publicity. When you get any sort of mention in any kind of press, if Facebook marketing is important for your business, don’t forget to suggest to people to follow you on Facebook.

When you write blog posts on your blog, in addition to having your standard Facebook like or share buttons, tell people to like you on Facebook right in the body of your posts. If people are reading your posts, at some point they will read to the part of the blog post that suggests for them to follow you on Facebook. It is a good way to put that call to action right in front of their eyes.

If you print business cards or any kind of marketing materials, if growing your Facebook presence is important to you, print your Facebook URL right on your business cards or any other marketing materials.

Another way to grow the number of people who like your Facebook business page is to use popular hashtags or mention people by name in your status updates. Hashtags will give you more ways in which your content can be discovered by random people who may not already be familiar with your business. And mentioning people by name will get them to comment and like your update, which will give you more visibility to their friends.

Additionally, you can purchase likes for your page. You can buy likes from fake or irrelevant users for very cheap prices just to bulk up your Facebook likes. Or you can buy likes from real people who may end up being potential clients by buying Facebook likes from Facebook. We’ll cover both of these strategies shortly.

25 Ways To Promote Your Business On Facebook

Here is a bonus tutorial with 25 strategies to promote your business on Facebook.

Get The Full Facebook Marketing Book

This is one of the sections of our full Facebook marketing for business book that you can get on your Amazon Kindle. Even if you don’t have an Amazon Kindle, you can get the Kindle app on your smart phone, and get the book there.

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Here is a video about my book on Facebook marketing for business.

25 Ways To Promote Your Business On Facebook

Get The Full Facebook Marketing Book

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