The Top 5 Tricks for Getting New Followers on Facebook In 2019 | SMMSUMO
Facebook is by far the most popular social media platform on the planet, and its demographic makeup reflects this; Facebook users are split down the middle in terms of gender, and are fairly evenly distributed in terms of age.
The platform lends itself to a number of different mediums, including written posts, links, images, and videos, so there aren’t many limitations here, and users tend to use “reactions” in reaction to posts or get involved in short thread-based discussions on content pieces they like.
Facebook is intended primarily as a means of helping individuals—like friends and family members—engage with each other, and as a result, the organic reach of company and organization pages has fallen in recent years. These principles make it harder to build a following on Facebook, but there are some key strategies that can help you overcome the organic visibility barrier and attract new customers regardless.
1. Contact Leveraging
Facebook is a hard platform to gain momentum on, and the first obstacle most brands face is getting to the first 100 likes. People aren’t willing to like a page unless it’s already received significant attention—the popularity of popularity in action—but you can work past this barrier by leveraging your existing pool of contacts.
- Friends and family. Though it may seem desperate on the surface, there’s nothing wrong with asking your friends and family for a little bit of Facebook marketing assistance—especially when you’re first starting out. Are your friends and family members going to count as “high quality” followers? Probably not, but they will give you an initial audience and a place to start growing. You could even ask them to share your new page with their friends, making your circle of influence even wider.
- Existing customers. This should go without saying, but make sure your existing customer base likes you on Facebook—especially if you plan to make special offers or include other incentives for continuing to work with your business. Here, you can either call up your clients and talk to them directly about it or you can send out a mass email update to get everyone liking your page at once.
- Employees. All your employees should like your Facebook page. Not only does it demonstrate an effective team morale and collective mentality, it will also help your workers stay abreast of the latest changes and strategies your brand comes up with. You may also consider asking your employees to share content posts occasionally, in an effort to drive up engagement numbers and reach.
- Vendors and partners. Finally, you can reach out to your vendors and partners to get some likes and shares for your material. Chances are, they’ll be more than willing to help you out. Even if they aren’t, you can propose an exchange in which both of your contribute social content or followers for the other.
2. Contests
Contests are a major way to win over new followers, for many reasons, some of which are more obvious than others. You can run a contest organically, using a series of posts to announce the contest, set the rules, and clear up any miscommunications, or you can use Facebook’s paid advertising platform to create a custom page or campaign for it.
To make the most effective Facebook contest possible, you have to look at the reasons why contests are good for attracting followers in the first place, and emphasize those.
- User engagement. First, contests get users engaged. There’s some level of necessary action that enters the user in a contest—this might be as simple as liking a page, but more sophisticated, engaging contests may require that users create and submit their own content. This level of engagement attracts new customers to your brand and helps sustain your relationships with them.
- Immediate value. Also, your contest will give your users an immediate value. For example, you might be giving away a $100 Amazon gift card to a handful of lucky winners; instantly, you’ve created a monetary incentive to like your page. This doesn’t exactly increase the quality of followers you’ll get, but it will aid you in quantity—and users who come to you for value will tend to stick around to see more value, so make the most appealing offer you can.
- Viral visibility. Contests give you the potential to achieve some degree of viral visibility. People like to share contests with their friends because it gives them a chance to win as well; if your contest is creative and compelling enough, it may start circulating by virtue of its content alone.
- Product distribution. You can also use your contests as ways to distribute free samples of your product or service; this, in turn, helps increase the visibility of your brand and attracts more followers to your Facebook page.
3. Giveaways
Giveaways are highly similar to contests, in that they’re intended to attract more attention by offering a unique value to your prospective followers. However, unlike a contest, there’s no specific action required by the end user. In some ways, this makes giveaways inferior to contests, as contests have a higher engagement factor, but there’s one key advantage that giveaways have for your brand: instant distribution of your products.
There are many types of giveaways you’ll have to consider. For example, you might give away a free product to each of the first 100 people to like your page, or you might tap your existing Facebook fans to give away prizes to randomly selected followers. Of course, the product, the timing, and the nature of the giveaway are all up to you.
One of the best ways to do it is to link your giveaway to some kind of future engagement; for example, when you ship out your product, you may include a note that encourages users to post about their prize on Facebook. This helps close the feedback loop, and allows your users to show off your products in real life.
Giveaways are also useful for attracting more Facebook followers when they’re targeted toward major influencers. For example, you can give a free product to a known blogger or reviewer in your industry, and have them review it on their site. Once it’s up, you can use that opportunity to maximize your product’s visibility and draw more people to your social brand.
4. Funneling
Funneling is another solid tactic to use when increasing your number of Facebook fans, but a better term might be “cross pollination,” depending on how you use it. Through the more literal funneling method, you’ll be optimizing your efforts in other marketing areas to send as many people as possible to your Facebook page.
For example, if you engage in an email marketing campaign, you’ll include more prominent links and calls to action to encourage users to like your Facebook page, or in a traditional advertisement, you might draw people to your Facebook page rather than your website. This is a strategic decision, and should only be used if your Facebook page is a high priority.
You can also “cross pollinate” your Facebook page with your other social media profiles, or any other online space where your business exists. For example, if you already have a substantial following on another platform, like Twitter, you can make it a point to call out your Facebook efforts, and vice versa, to ensure the greatest number of people follow you on each platform.
5. Exclusive Content
Most Facebook marketers opt to have some kind of syndication on their platform; they’ll post links to their most recently published content, and syndicate older links to revitalize content from months and years past. These are excellent overall strategies, because they draw your followers back to your site, maximizing the value of each potential follower, and they increase the overall visibility and value of each of your published pieces.
However, it’s also effective to create content that’s exclusive to Facebook, catering to a Facebook audience. While Facebook has no strict posting requirements, some of the most popular posts you’ll find are medium-length entries, a few sentences long, with an accompanying image to help the message stand out. These messages, sometimes excerpts from on-site content and sometimes existing in free form, will help you reach a broader audience on the Facebook platform specifically, even if you’re still using a straightforward content marketing campaign as a backdrop.
