How to really get your First 10,000 Fans on Facebook (Example)

The 10 steps below demonstrate with a real example the way to get a lot more than 10,000 fans on your Facebook business page.

Facebook is the king of social support systems with more than 1.79 billion active users each month (Updated December 2016). It’s utilised by a lot more than 60% of Internet users Worldwide and it is an excellent tool for promoting a product or service, finding customers or gaining more loyal readers (followers).

To employ this for business purposes, you must have plenty of fans (followers) on your Facebook business page. Let’s see below why having many Facebook fans is important.

What is the importance of having many Facebook fans on your business page?

It indicates popularity – It’s a given that this variety of fans reveals how popular an internet site is. A cheap business page with 100,000 followers is a bit more popular when compared to a page with 1,000 fans and this leads to a variety of other benefits (described below).

It indicates trust – If you can’t view the relationship between Facebook fans and business trust, are thinking about that this US State Department spent $630,000 to increase their Facebook Fans from 100,000 to two million through the years 2011-2012 (See related post from marketingland).

Why did this is done? Because in today’s World a prosperous business, website or blog will need plenty of Facebook fans. Five-years ago this didn’t make any difference however in the Twenty-first century, social proof is important.

More fans, more visits – The harder fans you might have, the more is the amount of people that can visit your posts in their timeline and perhaps go to your website.

While this is, it should be noted that does not your entire fans might find your posts.

As already explained within a previous post, How to increase your Facebook Page Organic Reach, just a small portion of your followers (no more than 4 percent) might find your status updates.

This number may vary, what is important to know now, is actually you might have 10,000 fans and you post a brand new update, it will be seen organically by way of a max of 300-400 people.

It’s great for SEO as well – Although officially The search engines do not admit that social media marketing is often a ranking factor, many studies show that popular websites on Facebook are more likely to perform better in search, than not very popular websites (variables being equal).

How to visit from 0 to 10,000 Facebook fans

Now that you will be convinced that having a lot of Facebook fans is important to your website and business, let’s see step-by-step the way to go from 0 to 10,000 fans.

Note: These are the exact same steps I followed to increase the facebook followers of my fitness blog’s facebook page. Currently the page has a lot more than 100K fans also it continous to cultivate organically.

Step 1: First things first – you must have a Facebook business page

It may appear silly for your experienced however for beginners to social media marketing this may be new things: A personal Facebook page differs from a company page.

If you would like to have friends on Facebook to share with you your holiday photos then you need to make a personal page though if you wish to have fans and followers to your website or business then you need to make a Facebook business page.

So, the first step would be to ensure that you create a Facebook business page as well as the second step would be to keep your page is correctly optimized.

Step 2: Optimize your Facebook business page

When we mention Facebook business page optimization we mean picking a friendly page title (username), writing an appealing description (from the short description field), providing accurate information for lengthy description, company overview, mission (see screenshot below) and naturally posting interesting content – this is the most crucial optimization tip of most.

The company’s content posted on your Facebook business page will even determine it’s success or failure.

Having an optimized Facebook page makes it much easier to attract new fans or higher likes from ads even as we might find below.

Step 3: Take advantage of your own personal Facebook account

I mentioned in step 1 above you need to use a business page and never a personal page, however you still need to have an active personal facebook account.

Here is the reason:

After you post an update on your business page, a great way to increase exposure and likes, would be to share that post on your personal page as well.

People you might have as friends on your personal page are more likely to ‘like’ and ‘interact’ using the post shared from the business page as well as boost the engagement factor of your posts.

As an outcome, facebook will show your posts to more fans (organically).

So, a great way to increase the number of people who view your posts and go after dark 4% of you fan base would be to share and promote the post on your personal page.

It is evident that this greater the variety of friends the larger would be the visibility in the post.

Also, just be sure you invite your entire existing friends (and brand new ones) to enjoy your Facebook business page. Do this every time you obtain a new ‘friend’.

Step 4: Add the Facebook Like box on your website

This is again social media 101 however you need to have the Facebook like box on your website for 3 reasons:

#1 – It’s a means to associate your site using the Facebook business page. Put simply it’s a strategy to ‘tell’ engines like google this is the official Facebook business page.

#2 – When you are getting plenty of fans, this can be something should be proud off the other to indicate on your users (as explained above therefore popularity, trust and social proof).

#3 – It’s a great way to improve your fan base organically. The future prospect can follow your site by clicking the LIKE button and never have to go to Facebook.

Hint: For optimal results, placed the LIKE box above fold (for the sidebar).

Hint 2: You can also popup such box to new users (for example, once they spend 60 seconds with a page, once they scroll right down to the bottom or once they try to leave your page – although this is useful when it comes to getting new likes, you have to be careful to never allow it to be too distracting to your users.)

Step 5: Follow these suggestions to increase post engagement

So far, we’ve created an optimized Facebook business page, added friends to our personal Facebook page and placed such box within a prominent position on the website.

The next natural step would be to start sharing happy to maintain your fans happy and maybe find a way to convert them from fans > internet site visitors > customers.

Some simple rules to follow along with that can boost the user engagement along with your facebook business page:

#1 – Share relevant content: Share content that your particular fans count on seeing within your page. As an example, if your web site is about Social websites, share content associated with social media marketing and never about sports or some different you could possibly like. In case your users want to read sports news, they know finding them.

#2 – Don’t forget which they follow your organization page to acquire updates regarding your website (and niche) and never regarding your social gatherings: If you wish to get social, then make use of your personal Facebook page, your organization page is approximately your site.

#3 – Typically thumb, I use my opportunity page to share with you content from my niche only, if I should share something which isn’t associated with my niche, I use my personal page.

#4 – Don’t be too promotional: Sharing promotional content (all the time) on your Facebook page will drive your fans away. For those who have an offer to share with you as well that may benefit your fans, you can do so but don’t add too much.

Try to write interesting, shareable content which is associated with your niche, of course this won’t come from your site. Have a balance between promotional and content that your particular followers might want to read.

Step 6: Share intriquing, notable and top quality content (not only links)

I made some tests regarding the impact of descriptions when you are conducting a Facebook update determined out that Facebook posts with ‘lists’ read more likes than posts with simply links. Let me give you an example to understand what What i’m saying is.

When you would like to share content from the website on Facebook, you try to Facebook status updates and go into the webpage URL. It looks something similar to this:

You can share this article without adding any other information. In case your title and images are fantastic, you will get several likes depending on the time you create the post, variety of fans etc.

If one one other hand, you enrich this page with the addition of additional information and particularly an inventory, then other pursuits being equal, you are prone to grow in likes and shares.

For me this makes sense because those that go to a title and image in their timeline might not ‘Like It’ because it provides no value for them (don’t forget that this average user is given numerous postings in their timeline when they login to Facebook).

On one other hand if you give them valuable, top quality and easy you just read information (as being a list), they are going to click the LIKE button given that they read something useful and never have to leave their timeline.

Note: It is just a known fact that individuals have a propensity of LIKING content without reading it so give them top reasons to do so; your site visits might not increase but the engagement factor of your posts will rise.

Step 7: Share images, videos and emotions

If you are taking a look at many of the most popular Facebook pages, so as to they tend to share with you images, videos, infographics, charts etc, together with their usual text only postings.

This type of content gets more likes and shares and thus the page gets more fans and followers.

In a recent study by Buzzsumo, they identified that this most shared and liked content on Facebook, has the following characteristics:

Step 8: Provide incentives to get additional fans & followers

Why should someone follow your Facebook business page?

You should give incentives to facebook users to follow along with your page. A couple of tips to consider:

Quality updates – This is the best incentive you can offer users. Before posting anything on your page, you have to make sure that it offers value on your audience. If you do this consistently, you existing followers will share it making use of their friends as well as get more users.

Run a competitive sport – Some websites run contests on Facebook and giveaway different gifts. The ‘price’ for joining this content would be to LIKE the page first. There are numerous tools to do that but are thinking about that if you don’t use a known brand this many ‘t be so successful.

Content upgrades – If you have your site, you may use ask users to enjoy your page to get an new version of your post. This implies extra tools however it is something worth checking out.

Step 9: You’ll want to advertise your own content and page

When you create your organization page don’t expect that it will magically get a huge number of fans. Apart from the tips outlined above, you might also need to advertise your organization page in places other than Facebook.

A few tips to take into consideration that worked for my case:

Promote in other social media marketing networks – If you have accounts with other social media marketing channels e.g. Google+, Pinterest etc. you can periodically ask your followers to participate yourself on Facebook as well. Be polite and tell them the huge benefits from the process.

Promote in Twitter – Besides posting regarding your Facebook page on other social media marketing networks, you can make the most of twitter’s interactive features.

When you recruit a new twitter follower, send them a private (personalized) message and enquire of these to follow yourself on facebook (both your business and personal pages).

This method eventhough it is time consuming, (I did it manually and never using any tools) it can produce fantastic results.

Promote within your newsletter – If you have a newsletter or if you engage with your readers via email, just be sure you ask them to follow your Facebook page.

Do not only write the FB URL using your signature but Inquire further politely to enjoy your organization page.

Step 10: Facebook ads is often a must

I have saved one of many easiest and a lot great ways to improve your Facebook fans for last, since it is on your own that it’s not free.

Facebook offers a self-service ad platform used to either improve your fan base (advertise your page), boost your posts, get more leads, increase conversions or perform variety of other actions (as shown from the image above).

The procedure is pretty basic and straightforward. Basically you decide on a site you own, select your goal (advertise your page), select your audience (based on country, age, other demographics and interests) and then set your everyday budget and duration.

The cost per campaign is dependent upon several factors. The easiest method to assess if Facebook ads is an excellent means to fix improve your fan base, would be to run a pilot campaign for two days.

Spend $10-$20 dollars daily and run the campaigns for any fixed duration (no less than a week). At the end, you can decide if the price per like is a thing you are happy to pay for.

I had great results with Facebook ads both for my websites as well as for client websites i run campaigns monthly (for a few days) to boost my facebook likes.

It should be noted by purchasing Facebook ads you don’t buy likes but views. Many people feel that that which you pay for is Facebook likes in fact you have to pay Facebook to indicate your ad to more Facebook users.

If what you really are advertising is interesting, then the best way to will hit such button so invest some time and think about the message you would like to display within your ad along with the image to work with.

Conclusion

Having a big variety of Facebook fans on your business pages is very important for credibility and social promotion purposes.

If this wasn’t critical in the initial place, then nobody would care as well as the US State Department wouldn’t need to spend $630 thousands for Facebook campaigns.

Once you do the essential optimizations on your business page (steps 1 and 2 above), then the easiest way to get additional followers is to apply Facebook ads. Along with some A/B testing you can get to 10,000 fans without a lot more than $1,000 (spread in to a time period of months).

Once you do everything properly and given that you do have a great product or service, you can improve your fans to 100,000+ like I did using the Facebook Page of my fitness blog.