Ultimate Guide: The strategy to Increase Likes on Facebook
Among the social networks where you could build a presence for your business today, Facebook is king. With over a billion active users, Facebook can help you reach an audience you might want to target, anywhere in the world.
While the social network has some of the most sophisticated ad targeting tools in existence, today’s post will be focused not on creating Facebook ads, but on free, quick, and easy ways to grow your page’s likes.
Strategy #1: Add Facebook-Like Call to Actions to your Blog.
Do you have a business blog? Most businesses do, even if it’s just a place for you to report news or, periodically post an article. No matter what, I bet it has more traffic than your Facebook Page.
A great strategy to turn your blog readers into Facebook Fans is to add a popup or opt-in bar.
A best practice here is to frame Liking your Facebook Page around the value to your readers. Consider value propositions like “To get our next article before anyone else, Like our Facebook Page!”
A best practice here is to frame Liking your Facebook Page around the value to your readers. Consider value propositions like “To get our next article before anyone else, Like our Facebook Page!”
Strategy #2: Add Social Media Icons to Your Emails.
This is a super simple, but often missed, way to increase your Facebook Likes. And it takes no time to implement. How many email contacts do you have? Even small businesses have a few hundred, and that number is constantly increasing as you generate blog subscribers, merchants or business leads.
Start using an email template (like the one below) which includes social media icons.
Strategy #3: Use Engagement to Your Advantage.
Engagement basically amounts to the level of interaction your posts inspire amongst the people that see them, and it is the yardstick for success on Facebook. The social network carefully tracks every view, click, like, comment, and share your updates receive, and rewards engaging updates by helping you reach more people organically – that is, without having to pay for it.
Engagement on Facebook works like this:
Every update is shown to a small, random slice of your fans – about 3% of them on average.
Unengaging posts – that is, the vast majority of updates – are shown to just those initial people and no one else.
Engaging posts – a very, very small minority of the posts by pages on Facebook – receive likes, comments, and shares, and these actions all tell Facebook that this update is something people want to see. Facebook will then show your update to more and more fans, as long as it continues to engage them.
At its most basic level, Facebook just wants to make its users happy by showing them the updates and content that they are most likely to enjoy.
Unengaging posts – that is, the vast majority of updates – are shown to just those initial people and no one else.
Engaging posts – a very, very small minority of the posts by pages on Facebook – receive likes, comments, and shares, and these actions all tell Facebook that this update is something people want to see. Facebook will then show your update to more and more fans, as long as it continues to engage them.
At its most basic level, Facebook just wants to make its users happy by showing them the updates and content that they are most likely to enjoy.
By the way, one surefire way to really screw up your engagement is to buy fake Facebook likes. Buying likes make one number look more impressive – your total number of likes – at the expense of every other number on your page (the individual likes, comments, and shares on each post). Buying fake fans is one of the worst mistakes you can make for your engagement, so just don’t do it!
Strategy #4: Put Your Best Foot Forward.
If you’ve spent any time on Facebook, you know that Facebook is always changing things. Most recently, Facebook has been migrating pages to a clean, three-column format where the profile picture no longer overlaps the cover photo.
The new page format hasn’t rolled out for everybody yet, but one of my favorite features of the new design is that the cover photo is no longer partially covered – giving you more room to work with. Starbucks has opted to use the new space to showcase their iced drink lineup. In the old design, the leftmost drinks would be partially obscured by the profile photo.
You can put your best foot forward on your page by making sure its design is high-quality and attractive. Use a clear profile image – a square format logo is a popular choice – that looks great even at small sizes. And take advantage of the cover photo to attract likes and interest; you can use it to spotlight sales, introduce customer success stories, or grow interested in new products.
Strategy #5: Ask Your Email Subscribers to Like your Page.
As I said above, even an early-stage business likely has a few email contacts. Why don’t you give them the opportunity to engage with you on Facebook as well as over email? This is a strategy which can be used right when you’re starting out (as soon as you create your Facebook Page) as well as down the line when you really start building your email list.
Strategy #6: Make Your Page More Visible.
To get more new likes, you have to improve the visibility of the page. There are various ways to do it. You can choose a Facebook page template that has a like button. You can also add a Facebook feed to your website. If you have other social media profiles for your company, promote your Facebook page to those channels and attract followers from there. You can also add a testimonial section to your website and include the reviews from Facebook.
Strategy #7: Know the Prime Time.
From Facebook Insights, you can regularly check the prime time when your page can reach a maximum number of people. Learn when your fans are online and try to share contents then. Just go to Insights and select Posts from the left sidebar. You will be able to view how your posts reach their audience at different times.
Strategy #8: Post Consistently.
I know, check any list like this one, for any social network, and it’s sure to extoll the values of sharing consistently. But I’ll emphasize it here, too, because it is true. Regularly publishing on your Facebook page keeps you at the forefront of your users’ minds, and if they tend to engage with your posts and learn to recognize them, they may be more likely to engage again in the future.
But it is all too easy for other tasks to get in the way of consistently sharing on Facebook. Posting on your Facebook page isn’t quite as easy as dashing off a tweet – you need to come up with a short but witty comment, sure, but then you have to make sure your image(s) look compelling and your title and description are optimized. All of this comes together to make a posting on Facebook a procrastination target.
Evade this behavior by getting the bulk of your updates out there in bulk. (See what I did there?) Create a content calendar each month, or even a regular sharing rotation, where your best content comes back in different ways every so often. Then, schedule ahead these updates using the Facebook scheduling tool.
Comments
Post a Comment