Privacy controversies aside, Facebook remains a social media giant. It's still one of the most active platforms on earth, with more than 3 billion monthly active users. Somewhere in those billions is your market. That means it's not too late to build your company's Facebook presence into a vibrant, revenue-generating community.
Here are nine tips to get your Facebook business page's likes and follows growing: six for using tools within Facebook to grow your following, and three for promoting your page elsewhere.
Use Facebook's own tools to grow your page
Meta is constantly rolling out new tools to help you understand and reach your market. Sometimes, frankly, the changes make things harder (tools get renamed, moved, or retired). But there's always a way.
1. Build your first wave of follows by inviting your friends from your personal profile to like and follow your business page. Facebook caps personal profiles at 5,000 friends. Say you get a 5 to 10 percent conversion; that's 250 to 500 followers. It isn't "viral," but you now have a few hundred followers you already have a relationship with, and you can build a campaign around asking them to share your page with their own friends. Facebook's feed algorithm favors content from friends and family, so being shared through friendly profiles is an excellent way to get seen by the friends of your connections.
2. Use Meta Business Suite Insights to learn about your audience and how your page is performing. (This is where the old "Page Insights" lives now.) You'll see how your page and individual posts perform, broken down by demographics, so you can do more of what works. Just as useful is the benchmarking tool, now called Businesses to Watch, under the Benchmarking section. It lets you track how your page stacks up against competitors: their follower growth, how often they post, and which of their content lands. Treat it as the competitor intel that it is. For researching the people you want to reach (their interests, demographics, and behaviors), that capability now lives inside Meta Ads Manager when you build an audience for an ad, since Facebook retired its standalone Audience Insights tool back in 2021.
3. Pay to play is a big part of Facebook page promotion. If you want to build followers fast or focus on a specific slice of your prospect pool, run targeted ads in Meta Ads Manager. One proven approach is a sequenced campaign, a series of ads delivered to the same audience over time, with each one building on the last to tell a story and introduce your brand and its value. Meta's own research has pointed to sequencing like this outperforming one-off ads. One note on targeting: Meta has automated much of it in recent years (its "Advantage+" audience tools let the system find buyers for you) and has trimmed many of the detailed targeting categories that used to be available, so expect a more hands-off, algorithm-driven setup than in the old days. And maximize your creative spend by also running page-promotion ads on another platform your market uses; a B2B brand, for instance, can target prospects on both Facebook and LinkedIn.
4. Another valuable pay-to-play option is to boost specific posts to audience segments. Rather than an ad for your page, boosting expands the reach of a particular post. You can boost to friends of your followers, your followers, or a targeted audience. Look through your page's Insights in Meta Business Suite, find a post that's already done well with your followers, and run a boost that targets similar people who don't follow you yet.
5. Consistently publish high-quality, relevant content. There are plenty of tricks for driving traffic to your page and earning likes, but if you want your community to grow your audience on your behalf, you have to give them shareable, relevant content worth passing along. Consistency matters more than volume; aim for a steady cadence (many brands land around once a day) and mix original posts with curated and re-shared content.
6. Run a Facebook contest to earn likes and encourage engagement. More activity on your page puts it in front of a broader audience, which can increase traffic and traction. Even something as simple as a gift card can be enough to get people to act. Just note that Facebook has specific rules about what you can and can't ask people to do in a promotion, so review the current promotion guidelines before you launch.
Getting likes and follows outside of Facebook
Use these tips to expand your efforts beyond the platform itself.
7. Work your email list. Many of your subscribers are on Facebook. Put together a couple of email campaigns to generate likes and follows. If you're running a contest, promote it to your list; you don't have to ask them to like your page directly, just give them the chance to enter the contest, which lives on your page. If you send a newsletter, include a note letting subscribers know you have a Facebook page and what they'll find there.
8. Add a Facebook call to action to your collateral. You probably already include social media buttons, which is good. Go a step further and publish digital and offline collateral with 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 you're both targeting the same audience segment. You might cross-promote each other's content, or jointly create something new, like a video, a fun quiz, or a poll that's relevant to both brands.
As you get going with a mix of these tactics, keep returning to your Business Suite insights. Always refine and relaunch your page-awareness efforts to optimize what's working. As your community grows, you'll hit a tipping point in size that brings a real jump in results for the campaigns that follow. The sooner you reach that point, the more impact your future campaigns will have, including the ones tied directly to revenue.
Does "boosting" still sound confusing, or want help growing your Facebook business page? Get in touch with our team and we'll help you put these tactics to work.
This is part of our guide to marketing your small business online.
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