How to Get More Fans for Your Facebook Page

Edited by Soham

The popular social networking site Facebook is a great place to advertise your fan page and get thousands of fans with timely and focused effort. It's not so much hard as methodical – if you apply yourself to regularly following through on getting fans and keeping them sweet, then you'll find your fan base continues to grow and grow. This article will help you to learn of a number of ways to popularize your fan page in an effort to increase its chances of being read by the masses.

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Create a Facebook fan page. This is, obviously, a necessary step if you haven't already created one. What might not be so obvious to people or businesses new to social media is that the fan page and "liking" is a relationship-building marketing tool with great potential.

• Try to grasp early on that your Facebook business page is your "brand". Even if you're not a company, business, entrepreneur, cause, etc., you're still developing a brand as an individual or hobbyist "social media expert", even if unwittingly so. As such, it's important to plan the page's appearance and content in some detail, including the image that you want to project from the outset. If you already have a fan page but you're not thrilled by the image you're currently projecting, now is the time to fix it!

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Click "Suggest to Friends". Once your Facebook fan page is published (or refurbished if needed), it's time to spread it as much as possible through your actual friends. If they accept your invitation to "like" your fan page, these will be your first "fans". Try to think of as many people as possible who you know, to begin with. If you have work colleagues, supporters of whatever it is you're doing (such as running a charity, starting a website, blog readers, etc.), ask these people too.

• Do spell it out concisely and politely that you'd appreciate it if they clicked "like" on your fan page. Not all people are clued in about what to do after they've clicked on the URL!
• Build on your friends' contacts. Ask your friends to suggest your page to their friends as well, both on Facebook itself and through any other methods they're comfortable with (such as Twitter or by email). Word-of-mouth and genuine friendship trust can be used to your advantage to obtain "friends of friends" who will possibly have similar interests to yours or will be thrilled to start following your page if you're a business or cause.
• If any of your good friends are highly influential on Facebook, ask them if they mind inviting their friends to become fans of your fan page. You can return the favor many times over by highlighting them now and then on your increasingly popular fan page!
• Try emailing friends who don't seem to be on Facebook already. This might be their first encouragement to join!
  you're a fan of other Facebook pages, add your comments and links on their status updates as often as reasonable. You'll most likely get the best results by posting your comments to pages with hundreds of thousands or even millions of fans, and by being one of the first to comment on updates made on those pages. Don't overdo your links, however; keep it to a reasonable amount or you'll risk annoying people.
  • Post a link to your Facebook fan page on other Facebook groups or pages. This is another way of attracting more fans. If you'd like, add a short explanation about the page with the link. Again, do this with care and not too frequently.
  • Use "@reply" (similar to the "@" function in Twitter), to tag a person on your Facebook page. Whenever you do this, your note appears on the page of the person or company whose name accompanies the "@reply". It's important not to overdo this though or you'll be pulled up for "spamming". And if you're a business, don't be surprised if a competitor does it back to your page; smile it off, as it's all part of the social media game!
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    Use contests for people who become your fans. Have your fans win something, whether it's a cyber-award you bestow on them, or a real, tangible product or service from your company, such as an eco-bag, a free dog wash, or a can of vanilla roasted peanuts. Try doing this fairly regularly, such as weekly or monthly.
    
  • Photo tag: Ask each winner if they wouldn't mind uploading a photo of themselves holding the item if they win something tangible, and ask them to tag themselves in the photo they've uploaded. This is a cool way of encouraging them to spread the word; many fans will do this because they'll be excited and grateful. These photos appear on your Facebook page in a "Fan Photos" folder (you could term it your "winner's" club, a page for others to see and aspire to!) and the tagged photos also appear in their own stream, encouraging their friends to check out your page. (It doesn't have to be a product they take a photo of; it can be a photo doing something that's related to your site, blog, or fan page, such as cooking a recipe or grooming a dog, etc.).
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    Place your Facebook link on other social media networks. For example, use your Twitter address link box to place your Facebook page URL rather than a site address. If you have a lively Twitter account, curiosity will cause a lot of your Twitter followers to click and follow through to your Facebook page. Whatever community you join, always be sure to include a link back to your Facebook page so that curious readers can find and connect with you there.
  • Use a Social Media Management tool to synergize activity across other social networks. Use a third party program such as Hootsuite or Seesmic to make it easier to manage this. Be careful using direct messages to send your Facebook link; more and more people are wary of "automated messages" as they feel that you're not being genuine using these. Try to add a personal touch to show you wrote it for them personally.
  • Be sure to share other people's Facebook updates too. This will create a reciprocal relationship that encourages them to share your Facebook updates with their followers and fans.
  • Use photo sites such as Flickr as a way to add your Facebook link. Upload some great photos worth viewing and include your Facebook URL as part of the description, such as "For more great shots or information, see XXX".
  • Whenever you add information about yourself to a user or contributor page on a social community site, include the Facebook link.
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    Add the "Facebook Like" tools to your website or blog. Using the "like" buttons or boxes makes it easy for people to find your fan page and to "like" it from your site or blog. Add it to your site or blog, preferably toward the top so that it's clearly visible. While the button is handy for sitting above posts or articles, having the box to one side is great because it shows real faces of the people who have already liked your Facebook page, and will include the statistics on people who are already your fans for potential new fans to learn about.
  
  • To add the Facebook Like box to your website: To add a Facebook Like Box to your website or blog: Go to your Facebook page and click on "Edit Page". Look for "Promote Your Page" and click on "Promote with a Like Box". Choose the height and width of the box as it will appear on your site. Tinker around for the best settings. Among the choices, it's helpful to use "Show Stream" and "Show Header" because this lets people see what you're posting to your Facebook page and they can click through immediately. Choose "Get Code" and insert the iFrame or XFBML code on your site or blog.
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    Keep your page worth visiting. People will be more inclined to keep visiting and to share your content if you maintain regular, interesting, and updated content. And you want them sharing that content, so ensure that it's the type of content people love to share, such as photos, photo sets, videos, and links to really interesting articles (including how-to's).
    • If possible, think of ways that you can create exclusive content that only gets published on your Facebook page – this means adding links and information that only shows up on your Facebook page and not on your site or blog. For example, perhaps you have recipes, news updates, or links you'd like to share with your fans that you're not sharing on your site or blog. This is a real incentive for people to like your Facebook page and follow it regularly; your readers will grow to look forward to the exclusive updates and will spread the word for you (see "Tips" for "fan only" content).
    • Use surveys, quizzes, interesting anecdotes, quotes, etc., to draw in interest. Don't just plug your own product, service, or interest – be generous in diversifying what you're sharing with your fans and they'll reward you by sharing the content, which in turn encourages others to join your page.
    • Regularly ask questions to elicit comments. People commenting on your page is gold dust. Their comments show up in their stream for their friends to read, again serving as an indirect incentive to get new fans. Besides which, comments help to create a solid sense of community on your Facebook fan page and show new fans that it's worth sticking around (and that you're a friendly and timely responder!).
    • Learn what balance works best for those following you. Keep an eye on the Facebook statistics to see how many readers stop following you, or block the reading feed. Too many doing either of these activities can be a sign that you're updating too frequently or your content is off course.
    • Equally, don't let your account stagnate; if you're heading off on a 6 week cruise, have regular input fed into a third party program such as Hootsuite, ready to upload regular content for you while you're away. Suddenly popping up again out of the blue can cause people to unlike your page because they'd forgotten you existed and no longer have the same level of "trust" or interest in your page.

How to Get More Likes on Facebook