How to obtain your First 10,000 Fans on Facebook (Case Study)

The 10 steps below demonstrate with a real example getting more than 10,000 fans on your Facebook business page.

Facebook will be the king of social networks using more than 1.79 billion active users each month (Updated December 2016). It can be utilised by more than 60% of Web users Worldwide and it is a fantastic tool for promoting a service or product, finding clients or gaining more loyal readers (followers).

To take advantage of this for business purposes, you must have a lot of fans (followers) on your Facebook business page. Let’s see below why having many Facebook fans is essential.

What will be the significance of having many Facebook fans on your business page?

It indicates popularity – It’s understandable the variety of fans reveals how popular a web site is. A popularity business page with 100,000 followers is more popular when compared to a page with 1,000 fans which leads to a variety of other benefits (described below).

It indicates trust – If you can’t understand the relationship between Facebook fans and business trust, are thinking about the US State Department spent $630,000 to boost their Facebook Fans from 100,000 to 2 million throughout the years 2011-2012 (See related post from marketingland).

Why did they do this? Because in today’s World a successful business, website or blog needs a lot of Facebook fans. 5 years ago this did not make a difference but in the Modern, social proof is essential.

More fans, more visits – Greater fans you have, the more will be the number of people that may view your posts within their timeline and perchance call at your website.

While this is correct, it ought to be noted that does not all of your fans will discover your content.

As already explained inside a previous post, How to boost your Facebook Page Organic Reach, only a tiny proportion of your respective followers (at most 4 %) will discover your status updates.

This number can differ, but what is essential to know now, happens when you have 10,000 fans and also you post a brand new update, it’ll be seen organically by way of a max of 300-400 people.

It’s best for SEO as well – Although officially Google does not admit that social networking is a ranking factor, many studies show popular websites on Facebook are more likely to perform better in search, than not quite popular websites (additional factors being equal).

How to travel from 0 to 10,000 Facebook fans

Now that you’re believing that having a great deal of Facebook fans is essential for the website and business, let’s see step-by-step the way to go from 0 to 10,000 fans.

Note: These are the basic very same steps I followed to boost the facebook followers of my fitness blog’s facebook page. Currently the page has more than 100K fans plus it continous growing organically.

Step 1: Firstly – you must have a Facebook business page

It may seem silly to the experienced but also for beginners to social networking this might be a new challenge: Your own Facebook page differs from a company page.

If you need to have friends on Facebook to share with you your holiday photos you will want to make a personal page though if you wish to have fans and followers for the website or business you will want to make a Facebook business page.

So, the first task is always to make certain you develop a Facebook business page as well as the second step is always to make sure that your page is correctly optimized.

Step 2: Optimize your Facebook business page

When we discuss Facebook business page optimization we mean choosing a friendly page title (username), writing an appealing description (in the short description field), providing accurate information for very long description, company overview, mission (see screenshot below) not to mention posting interesting content – here is the most crucial optimization tip of.

The company’s content posted on your Facebook business page will also determine it’s success or failure.

Having an optimized Facebook page makes it much simpler to attract new fans or maybe more likes from ads once we will discover below.

Step 3: Take advantage of your personal Facebook account

I mentioned in 1 above you will want to possess a business page and not an individual page, but you still need to provide an active personal facebook account.

Here means that:

After you post an update on your business page, a great way to boost exposure and likes, is always to share that post on your personal page as well.

People you have as friends on your personal page are more likely to ‘like’ and ‘interact’ together with the post shared from the business page and will also improve the engagement factor of your respective posts.

As an end result, facebook can have your content to more fans (organically).

So, a great way to boost the amount of folks that view your content and go beyond the 4% individuals group of followers is always to share and promote the post on your personal page.

It goes without saying the more variety of friends the greater would be the visibility from the post.

Also, make sure that you invite all of your existing friends (and brand new ones) to enjoy your Facebook business page. Do this when you obtain a new ‘friend’.

Step 4: Add the Facebook Like box on your website

This is again social internet marketing 101 but you require the Facebook like box on your website for several reasons:

#1 – It’s a way to associate your website together with the Facebook business page. In other words it’s a strategy to ‘tell’ search engines like yahoo that this will be your official Facebook business page.

#2 – When you invest in a lot of fans, that is something you needs to be proud off then one to exhibit on your users (as explained above what this means is popularity, trust and social proof).

#3 – It’s a sensible way to improve your group of followers organically. Readers can follow your website by clicking such button while not having to head to Facebook.

Hint: For maximum results, set the LIKE box above fold (about the sidebar).

Hint 2: It’s also possible to popup the like box to new users (for example, once they spend A minute on the page, once they scroll right down to the bottom or once they try to leave your page – although this works well when it comes to getting new likes, you ought to be careful to not ensure it is too distracting for the users.)

Step 5: Follow these tips to increase post engagement

So far, we’ve created an optimized Facebook business page, added friends to personal Facebook page and placed the like box inside a prominent position on the website.

The next natural step is always to start sharing content to maintain your fans happy and possibly manage to convert them from fans > website visitors > customers.

Some simple rules to check out that may improve the user engagement with your facebook business page:

#1 – Share relevant content: Share content your fans expect to see with your page. For example, should your web site is about Social media, share content in connection with social networking and not about sports or something different you could like. Should your users wish to read sports news, they are fully aware where to locate them.

#2 – Don’t forget which they follow your small business page to obtain updates relating to your website (and niche) and not relating to your social gatherings: In order to get social, then use your personal Facebook page, your small business page is about your website.

#3 – Usually thumb, I personally use my company page to share with you content from my niche only, basically should share something just isn’t in connection with my niche, I personally use the page.

#4 – Don’t be too promotional: Sharing promotional content (constantly) on your Facebook page will drive your fans away. For those who have a campaign to share with you or something like that that may benefit your fans, this can be done but don’t overdo it.

Try to post interesting, shareable content that is in connection with your niche, of course this doesn’t come from your website. Have a balance between promotional and content your followers might choose to read.

Step 6: Share intriguing, notable and high quality content (not simply links)

I made some tests about the impact of descriptions when you are performing a Facebook update and discovered out that Facebook posts with ‘lists’ get more likes than posts with only links. Let me give you one example to understand I am talking about.

When you need to share a blog post from the website on Facebook, you want to Facebook status updates and enter in the webpage URL. It looks something like this:

You can share this text without adding any extra information. Should your title and pictures are fantastic, you’ll get several likes with regards to the time you create the post, variety of fans etc.

If one the opposite hand, you enrich this post with the addition of more details and also a list, then other items being equal, you happen to be prone to gain in likes and shares.

For me this will make sense because individuals that visit a title and image within their timeline might not ‘Like It’ since it provides no value for many years (don’t forget the average user is assigned numerous postings within their timeline when they login to Facebook).

On the opposite hand whenever you provide them with valuable, high quality and simple to read information (being a list), they’re going to click on the LIKE button because they read something helpful while not having to leave their timeline.

Note: It is just a known undeniable fact that everyone has a tendency of LIKING a blog post without reading it so provide them with top reasons to accomplish that; your website visits might not increase nevertheless the engagement factor of your respective posts will rise.

Step 7: Share images, videos and emotions

If you are taking a review of one of the most popular Facebook pages, so as to they have an inclination to share with you images, videos, infographics, charts etc, and their usual text only postings.

This type of content gets more likes and shares and as a result the page gets more fans and followers.

In majority of folks by Buzzsumo, they identified the most shared and liked content on Facebook, has got the following characteristics:

Step 8: Provide incentives to get more fans & followers

Why should someone follow your Facebook business page?

You should give incentives to facebook users to check out your page. A few tricks to consider:

Quality updates – This is actually the best incentive you can give your users. Before posting anything on your page, you should make certain that it offers value on your audience. Choosing this consistently, you existing followers will share it using their friends and will also get more users.

Run a competition – Some websites run contests on Facebook and giveaway different gifts. The ‘price’ for joining this article is always to Such as the page first. There are many tools to do this but are thinking about that if you don’t possess a known brand this many stop so successful.

Content upgrades – For those who have your blog post, you should use ask users to enjoy your page with an updated version of your respective post. This implies extra tools yet it’s something worth trying out.

Step 9: You have to promote your own content and page

When you create your small business page don’t expect that it’s going to magically get 1000s of fans. In addition to the tips outlined above, you also have to advertise your small business page in places other than Facebook.

A few tricks to take into account that helped my case:

Promote in other social networking networks – For those who have accounts with other social networking channels e.g. Google+, Pinterest etc. you can periodically ask your followers to join you on Facebook as well. Be polite and show them the benefits from doing so.

Promote in Twitter – Besides posting relating to your Facebook page on other social networking networks, you can make the most of twitter’s interactive features.

When you get a new twitter follower, send them a private (personalized) message and ask them to follow you on facebook (both your business and personal pages).

This method eventhough it is time consuming, (I did it manually and not using any tools) it might produce really good results.

Promote with your newsletter – For those who have a newsletter or if you communicate with your readers via email, make sure that you ask them to follow your Facebook page.

Do not simply write the FB URL using your signature but Inquire further politely to enjoy your small business page.

Step 10: Facebook ads is a must

I have saved one of several easiest and many effective ways to raise your Facebook fans for last, as it is often on your own that it’s not free.

Facebook comes with a self-service ad platform which you can use either to raise your group of followers (promote your page), boost your posts, get more leads, increase conversions or perform variety of other actions (as shown in the image above).

The procedure is quite simple and straightforward. Basically you choose a site you possess, select your goals (promote your page), select your audience (determined by country, age, other demographics and interests) and after that set your evryday budget and duration.

The cost per campaign depends on several factors. The best way to assess if Facebook ads is a superb means to fix raise your group of followers, is always to manage a pilot campaign for a few days.

Spend $10-$20 dollars daily and run the campaigns for any fixed duration (at least weekly). By the end, you can decide if the price per like is a thing you happen to be prepared to pay for.

I had accomplishment with Facebook ads both for my websites as well as for client websites and that i run campaigns every month (for a few days) to enhance my facebook likes.

It needs to be noted that with Facebook ads you don’t buy likes but views. Many people believe that whatever you pay for is Facebook likes but usually you make payment for Facebook to exhibit your ad to more Facebook users.

If what you really are advertising is interesting, then more and more people will hit the like button so spend some time and take into account the message you need to display with your ad plus the image to utilize.

Conclusion

Having a huge variety of Facebook fans on your business pages is essential for credibility and social promotion purposes.

If this wasn’t critical in the first place, then nobody would care as well as the US State Department wouldn’t must spend $630 thousands for Facebook campaigns.

Once you need to do the mandatory optimizations on your business page (steps 1 and a couple of above), then this easiest method to get more followers is to apply Facebook ads. With a bit of A/B testing you may get to 10,000 fans without any more than $1,000 (spread in a amount of months).

Once you need to do everything properly and provided you’ve got a great service or product, you can improve your fans to 100,000+ like I did together with the Facebook Page of my fitness blog.