It finally happened: your business has started posting on Facebook. But why does your page feel like a ghost town? When you do post, you’re getting very little interaction. How in the world do major brands manage to be so successful on Facebook? Other leadership at your company might even question, “why do social media at all?”
A lot of small businesses make the mistake of asking their friends, families, and coworkers to like the page. This might be helpful in boosting your follower count from 0 to 100, but ultimately you are likely asking people to follow you who do not actually use your product or service.
So, the age old question of “quantity versus quality” arises. But you don’t have to pick just one. With proper strategy and follow through, it’s possible to have a large quantity of high-quality followers.
Focus on building an authentic audience solely of customers, users, or clients. To do this quickly, you’re going to need Facebook advertising. Here’s a solid strategy to spark your page growth.
Start Posting
If you want to see your natural rate of page growth, start by posting your content to your page without financial backing. Usually, the growth is slow and often miniscule. And it’s a real bummer.
You’ll want to juice up your Facebook presence at a faster rate. The way to achieve this goal is through this three-part Facebook Ads strategy.
* If you are new to Facebook ads and Ads Manager, review our blog on the keys to creating engaging Facebook ads and follow Facebook’s steps to create an Ads Manager account.
1. Facebook Page Building
If you build it, they will come. Page building is the act of increasing the number of followers on your Facebook page. You don’t want to just be shouting into the void. Facebook pages with a higher amount of followers reach more people. The more people you reach, the more likely you are to sell your product or service. So, we need to start by getting new people to like your page.
- Create ‘Page Like’ ads targeting people with Interests related to your product or service. Here is a tutorial on how to do that.
You will gain page likes for these ads and increase the amount of people that can see your posted content on their feeds.
It’s all a numbers game. Facebook’s algorithm shows content to a percentage of your followers, if they react positively to the post, then Facebook shows that post to more people. That’s why growing a page isn’t enough. You need engaging, original content. Good content means more people are clicking on your posts and Facebook wants to spread the word.
The next step is to direct users to your website.
2. Drive Traffic to Your Website From Facebook
You want an audience of website visitors to repeatedly advertise to, also known as retargeting, because they have shown interest in your product or service. If your website visitor rate is low, send traffic to your website from a Facebook ad. The purpose of getting this traffic to your website is to save it into a Custom Audience, allowing you to later advertise your Facebook content to them.
Still new to Facebook audiences and how to build one? A custom audience is simply traffic you collected yourself and placed into a group you intend to market your product to later. Check out this guide on how to set up your own custom audience. Now, back to the action.
Here’s how to create the audience we need.
- Capture traffic with Facebook Pixel. Here’s a guide on how Pixel works.
- Use traffic captured by the Pixel and place it in a ‘Custom Audience’. Here’s how.
- Create a ‘Lookalike Audience’ based off your ‘Custom Audience’. Here’s a tutorial on how to create LAL Audiences.
According to Facebook, A Lookalike Audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your best existing customers.
So now you can advertise to people who never visited your website or Facebook page, but have similar traits to your existing website users. This is how you scale up your audience to get the word out about your business.
Now, it’s time for the final step. You have your Lookalike Audience and can execute the remainder of the strategy.
3. Promote Your Social Content on Facebook
Create sponsored posts with the social content you’ve already posted. You will have your Lookalike Audience to send your social posts to as sponsored posts.
- Create ‘Sponsored Content’ Ads and use your Lookalike Audience as your targeted audience.
- Run ads and increase your post engagements (reactions, shares, comments, etc.)
Finally, watch your page likes and engagements grow.
Bringing It All Together
Continue to post to Facebook as usual, but now you have more page follows from your ‘page likes’ ad. These new eyes will allow more people to organically see your posts. The more people who organically see your posts, the more likely you are to increase page engagements. The more page engagements you have, the more potential shares you receive. Post shares then expose content organically to an entirely new audience.
This will increase your likelihood of receiving page likes from the new shared audience. You can see how this is a repeating loop, and how you can scale your page followers quickly.
It’s a simple equation:
More Page Followers = More Engagement = More Page Followers
Now the people who like your page are seeing your content organically (improving overall engagement), plus you have supplemental traffic seeing certain social posts you boosted that your business deems pertinent.
‘Page Likes’ ads, in tandem with content marketing and sponsored posts, will increase both page growth and page engagements to help accelerate your success on Facebook.
While we’ve just scratched the surface, there are many different ways to optimize your ad strategy further. Need any help? Have questions about the process? Shoot us a message on Facebook and we will let you know.
