Do you worry about it too?
Do you ever look at Facebook and ask yourself, “How do I get more followers and engagement on my Facebook business page?” Or, “How do I get more page likes on Facebook?”
For small business owners, this is one of the most frustrating challenges we hear about.
According to data published in 2019, 66% of Americans are using Facebook. This means that it is very likely that 2/3rds of your customers are actively on Facebook.
As a digital marketing agency, Walker Kreative ensures all our clients have established their presence on Facebook with a complete, SEO-optimized Facebook Business Page.
Once you have established your business on Facebook with a Business Page, the next step is filling up your page with content and gaining page likes and followers.
A “Follower” on Facebook is a person who is following your page. Meaning when you post content on your Facebook page, it is likely to show up on their feed.
A “Page Like” is someone who has liked your page. Their name is now associated with your page. Typically, when someone clicks on the button to like your page, they automatically become a follower. At any point, a user can change their settings to unfollow your page – so they stop seeing updates from your page. Similarly, they can unlike your page and stop being associated with your page.
Increasing your Facebook page followers increases the reach of your posts. If you only have 5 page followers, your posts aren’t going to reach many people.
5 TIPS TO GAIN FOLLOWERS ON FACEBOOK
Here are 5 simple ways you can increase your followers on Facebook.
1. Invite your personal Facebook friends to follow your page.
On your business page you can find an option to invite your personal Facebook friends and connections to follow your business page. On a desktop computer, from your business page, click on the button with two dots to the far right below your page’s designated call-to-action button. From there you will see the option to invite friends.
2. Invite people that engage with your post to follow your post.
If your page has less than 100,000 followers, you can invite people who like your post to like your page. Click on the reactions button on one of your posts. This will pull up a list of the people that reacted to your post and you will see a button to invite them. As you can see below, we can see the people that reacted to our post, who already likes our page, and who we can invite.
3. Post engaging content.
This is one of the most important things to do across all social media platforms. Find out what your followers or audience engages with and post that type of content. Not all of your business posts should be about your company or “sales posts”. In fact, this should only be a small percentage of your posts. Instead, be social. This will gain you more followers, interest and trust in your brand. If you are a dentist, share posts about dental tips, pictures with staff, staff birthday posts, special offers, etc…
Follow our 80/20 social post rule. In other words, 80% of your posts should be fun, cute or helpful community based and 20% should sell your products or services.
For example:
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- Monday post: Cute puppy visits the office.
- Tuesday post: Happy birthday to the front office person with a cupcake.
- Wednesday post: Video post where the owner gives support to a local cause like a boy scout fundraiser or blood drive or pet shelter (and you tag that group in the post).
- Thursday post: You and/or your staff ordered food from a local restaurant and you give them a shout out on FB with a picture and tag them in the post.
- Friday post: You share a post that reminds everyone this weekend is a 25% off ________ services at your __________ location.
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As a tip, look at some of your competitors’ pages or other businesses like yours – even in other cities. Look for those that are getting good engagement with their Facebook business page and see what they are posting. Scroll through their page, see which posts get a lot of likes or shares and what doesn’t. Don’t copycat them, but rather see how you can implement some of their successful actions on your page.
4. Send out an e-mail to your subscribers inviting them to follow you on Facebook.
A simple short e-mail with a direct link to your Facebook page, letting your e-mail list know that you are on Facebook and want to stay connected is very easy to do.
5. Create a Facebook Ad to gain followers.
“How do you create a Facebook ad to gain followers?”, is a huge question we get. This is the more expensive route, but can be the fastest.
You can create an ad in Ads Manager to gain more followers for your page. While creating your ad you can be very detailed or very broad in your audience targeting. The cost will vary broadly per page follower – someone targeting an area of 20,000 people who rarely use Facebook will result in a pretty high cost per page follower. The more detailed and narrow your audience, the higher the cost is going to be. However, these will also be people that are more likely to engage with your Facebook page and potentially convert into clients or patients. An ad targeting worldwide can result in fast cheap followers, less than a penny per follower in some cases. However, this will result in followers that may or may not fit your client profile and who will not often engage with your posts.
Gaining Facebook followers is a vital action everyone should work on. Having a high volume of followers increases the chances of your business’ messages getting to more people – however, it doesn’t guarantee it.
Along with gaining followers, it is necessary to post good engaging content. When users engage with your posts, Facebook will keep showing your new posts to those users. If users don’t engage with your posts then Facebook will cease showing your posts to those users. When a user sees a post of yours that they really like, they may share it. Your post now has the potential to reach all of that person’s contacts.
For ideas on what to post to social media, you can check out our Ideas and Tips here!
Christine Leacox
Walker Kreative
Check out our YouTube channel for more small business marketing ideas.
