You can easily increase the number of people who “like” your Facebook page. Even better, you can do it while taking a genuine, organic approach to building an online community there.
I highly recommend using Facebook ads to grow your page’s fanbase. They get results when used to promote a page. I have used them for a couple of pages and I have found them to be very effective.
Here’s why:
- You get a great bang for your buck - Choose to pay only for clicks on your ad. That way you only pay when someone sees your ad and takes action. We are not talking big money here. Costs per click can be as low as 50 cents.
- You control your budget - You decide how much you spend by indicating the maximum you are willing to pay for a click (in Facebook’s behind the scene auction for placing ads). You can also set a daily limit or a limit for your entire campaign. Combined with being able to set an end date for your campaign, you can put a definite cap on how much you are willing to spend. You can change these numbers later if you would like to spend more or less or you can afford to spend more per day because of money that wasn’t use earlier in the campaign.
- You can target your ad - You can choose from demographic data collected by Facebook to ensure your ad gets in front of your key audiences. You don’t get data on individual Facebook users but you can indicate that you would like your ad to be shown to people who fit a certain profile such as: lives in Kitchener or Waterloo, male, 25-50, married. There are many other choices such as interests that can also be used to target your ad.
You want your new fans to be worth spending money to attract so targeting is critical to growing your page organically. You want people liking your page that fit who you are, what you do and where you do it. There’s no sense advertising to people across Canada if the vast majority of your customers live in Cambridge. You should know who you would most like to have being involved in your page and target the ad to them.
You want to be as specific as possible without being too specific. If your ad is only potentially being seen by a handful of people, you are not likely to get the desired results. So pay attention when creating your ad to where it tells you how many people fit the description you are creating.
- You get good statistics - You can access reports that show the number of impressions and the number of clicks and other important details such as the average cost per click and total amount spent. You can then compare how your page grows to get a rough idea on how much you are spending for each new fan. The link is not direct since you will get fans other ways too but I expect you’ll notice the difference from when you were not running an ad.
When to use
I suggest using Facebook ads as a part of your promotional strategy to announce your page and attract people to connect with it. You might do this when you create the page or you may prefer to promote once you have established a comfort level with your page and how you will use it. For this purpose, you are best to set aside a sum of money for a set period of time. You may only need $100 to get the results you seek. A bigger maximum investment like $300 or $500 may be worth considering. Or you might look at a daily maximum of $10 - $25. In either case, I would suggest your campaign run from between a week and a month.
Then I suggest that you keep a similar ad running with a minimal budget after your initial campaign helps establish a core for a vibrant community on your Facebook page. I recommend targeting your ongoing ad to the Facebook friends of those who currently like your page. Chances are that your fans know the people that you are trying to reach and so tapping into their network is an organic way to grow your page. You can see results from this approach by spending as little as $2.50 per day-yes two dollars and fifty cents. In fact, most days you are unlikely to spend even that much!
No shortcuts but a critical mass is needed
Using Facebook ads is a great way to build awareness of your page and to grow its supporters but the best way will always be to engage people with content that they find interesting and valuable. Having content and sparking conversations is the best way to get into people’s Facebook newsfeeds and those of their friends. It’s also the best way to keep them interested and connected so that you don’t fall off their radar screen. You still need to do all the right things for your page to help your business or organization (a whole other post or series of posts!).
Getting fans just to have a big number is not in and of itself a criteria for a page’s success. Having 100 engaged fans is much more important than having 1000 or 10 000 who never visit your page or see it in their newsfeeds. And growing your page too fast is likely to leave people unengaged or possibly being dissatisfied if you have not dedicated resources to supporting it such as big corporations do.
But you also need a critical mass of people to increase the odds of having a conversation and to build a community. Facebook ads are an excellent way to attract enough people to create this critical mass.
You can also use Facebook ads to sell people things or get them to take other actions. That is a whole other situation and using the ads those ways may require a bigger investment and/or more sophisticated techniques. If you’re just getting onto Facebook or looking to enhance your presence there, I think you are best to use your ad money to grow your page and then use the relationships you establish to over time achieve other objectives.
Note: I am not getting any financial rewards from Facebook for this post. My firm does though offer helping you with Facebook ads as one of its services.
