... is the question many people ask when it comes to Facebook!
Firstly, I won't lie to you - it's not easy!
Secondly, I provide my clients with information about the best ways to go about building their fan base and the conversation usually starts with 'There is no magic wand" or "No quick fixes" and "Quality is better than quantity" - however I've needed to open my mind little on this one recently.
There are pages on Facebook that are dedicated to helping you get more fans for you Facebook page - an example is the Send in the Troops and I've also seen posts on Linkedin encouraging people world wide to like each others pages.
At first, I was very much ANTI these pages and advised clients not to take part in it as they will end up with lots of likes but an audience who are potentially not listening. My reasoning for this is predominantely I've been working with clients that have been based in South Wales with their customers also based in South Wales too.
However, I've had a bit of feedback that suggests that this can help (however in my opinion it's not something you should use long term).
So here is my summary and tips if you are considering or have already gone down this route:
- FIRST - List all of the ways you can get your current customer base and new customers to Like your page and implement these (before you try out these quick fixes)
- To grow your fan base organically create content that will help your page go viral
- Give the quick fix a go if you need to quickly reach 25 Likes to get your vanity/shortened URL for marketing - we always need a helping hand with this
- If your product/service is available nationally/internationally (eg. Internet sales), then possibly worth giving these quick fixes a go as you can potentially convert your new 'likes' into customers - but if you're a local business dealing locally you are likely to get irrelevant fans
- If you are going to use it, ensure you set your wall settings so that users can only comment on posts - otherwise you will end up with alot of unwanted posts on your wall - also resulting in many notifications, therefore leaving a genuine customer enquiry mixed in with the 'spam'
- OR if you do want to open up your wall, ensure you set it that only posts by page are viewed on arrival to the page
- Monitor your insights for the loation of your fans (however this isn't truly accurate due to IP addresses and relying on people completing their profiles) and if people are unsubscribing from your posts
- And finally, if you're getting people to come by in their masses it is probably because you've 'liked' many other pages - if their posts are too frequent or irrelevant either hide their posts from your news feed or 'unlike' their pages, they won't know who has done this!
I'm hoping the above gives you a little bit of advice about these quick fixes! I'm still not a fan of it, but if it's worked for some clients I shouldn't really ignore it as there is no rule book as such when it comes to these things - just people's opinoins on what is good and bad practice!
If you've got this far then I'd really like to hear your comments on this!
Thanks :-)
