9 Tips for Ramping up Your Facebook Business Page Audience

Recent controversies about privacy aside, Facebook remains a social media giant. It remains the world’s most active social media platform with 1.45 billion daily users. Somewhere in that 1.45 billion is your market. That means it’s not too late for you to build your company’s Facebook presence into a vibrant, revenue-generating community.

Here are nine tips to help you get your Facebook business pages’ “Likes” going; six tips for using different tools within Facebook to grow your following, and another three tips for promoting your Facebook page elsewhere.

Facebook wants your page to rock – use their tools to make that happen.

Facebook is continually rolling out new tools that can help you understand and reach your market. Sometimes – frankly – Facebook changes make things a bit more difficult. But there’s always a way.

1. Build your first wave of follows by inviting your friends from your personal Facebook page to Like and Follow your Facebook business page. Currently, Facebook only allows you to max out your profile friends at 5000. Let's say you get somewhere between a five and 10 percent conversion here; that's between 250 and 500 followers. That doesn't qualify as "viral." Nevertheless, you now have a few hundred followers with whom you already had a prior relationship and can create a campaign around asking them to promote your page to their profile friends. Facebook recently changed its newsfeed algorithm to prioritize family and friend content in people's feeds. Thus, getting promoted through friendly profiles can be an excellent way to be seen by friends of your connections.

2. Use the Facebook Page Insights tool to learn more about your market on Facebook. One of the valuable bits of information you can learn here is how your page compares to similar pages. When you're starting out, this isn't merely about setting benchmarks for you to hit. It's about finding out what competitor pages are doing that's working for them. Who are they targeting? What kind of content are they posting? Treat it as the font of competitor biz intel that it is and use it accordingly. You'll also see detailed information about how your page and specific bits of content are performing, broken down by particular demographics. Use the Facebook Audience Insights tool to learn about what your potential customers are doing on Facebook so that you can target them effectively with content or ad geared toward a specific interest, location or more detailed persona profile.

3. Pay to play is undoubtedly a large part of Facebook page promotion. If you want to build followers fast or focus on a specific segment of your prospect pool, running targeted Facebook ads can provide a boost. Research from Facebook found that running a “sequenced” ad campaign to the same target audience significantly boosted conversion rates. The campaign delivered a series of three ads over two weeks, with each ad building off the previous one, which allowed the brand to present its store and value to the users. As a side note: Maximize your creative spend on ads by running ads promoting your Facebook page on a social media platform that's also popular with your market. For example, if you're a B2B brand, you can target prospects on both Facebook and LinkedIn.

4. Another valuable pay to play option is to "boost" specific posts to audience segments. Instead of an ad for your Facebook page, boosting a post expands the potential reach of a particular post on your page. You can choose to boost a post with friends of your followers, followers, or a targeted audience. Look through your Audience Insights to find a post that's already done well with your followers. Run a boost campaign for that post that targets similar Facebook users who aren't yet followers.

5. Consistently publish high quality, relevant content. There are tons of tricks for driving traffic to your Facebook page and even getting them to like/follow it. If you want to mobilize your community to grow your audience on your behalf, you have to publish shareable, relevant content. Coschedule conducted a meta-analysis of social media benchmark studies to see how often a company should publish on Facebook. Based on their findings, they recommend once a day, including curated and re-sharing past posts.

6. Run a Facebook contest to get likes and encourage engagement on your Facebook page. Increasing fan action on your page gets your page in front of a broader audience, which can increase its traffic and traction. Even offering something as simple as a gift card is enough to induce people to take action on your Facebook page. There are rules on what you can and cannot ask people to do in a Facebook contest, so be sure to check out the rules.

Getting likes and follows outside of Facebook.

Use these tips to expand your efforts outside of Facebook.

7. Work your email list. Many of your subscribers are likely on Facebook. Put together a couple of different email campaigns to generate likes and follows. If you're running a Facebook contest, promote it to your email list. You don't need to ask them specifically to like your Facebook page. Just provide the opportunity to enter the contest . . . that's on your Facebook page. If you send out a newsletter, include an ad letting them know you have a Facebook page and what they'll find there.

8. Put a Facebook call-to-action on your marketing collateral. You probably already include social media buttons, which is good. Publish digital and offline marketing collateral that contains an explicit call to action to Like your Facebook page.

9. Run a cross promotion campaign with a related brand or company that also wants to grow its page. The key is that both companies are targeting the same audience segment. The campaign can be to cross-promote each other’s content. It may be to jointly create some new content, perhaps a video, fun quiz or poll that’s relevant to both brands.

Don’t forget to go back to your campaign and page insights as you get started with a mix of actions to grow your page like count. Always refine and re-launch your page awareness tactics to optimize your efforts. As your Facebook community grows, you'll find that you will hit a tipping point in size that brings a quantum improvement in results for subsequent campaigns. The sooner you can hit that tipping point number for your Facebook page, the greater impact your future campaigns, including those more directly tied to generating revenue, will have.

Does "boosting" still sound confusing? Want help expanding your Facebook business page? We’re here to help.