In order to achieve success on Facebook you need an engaged community. Without one, there’s no one to see or read your content, making it difficult to build brand awareness and deliver ROI.
However, it’s not just about the quantity of Facebook Likes, it’s about the quality. You need to attract the right audience and engage them in ways that align to your business goals. Getting good results on Facebook involves equal parts common sense, understanding how Facebook works, and using free social media monitoring tools to help you fine-tune your page.
Here are 10 ways to increase quality Facebook Page likes for your business:
1. Optimize your Facebook Page Info
2. Post engaging content
3. Be active
4. Promote your Facebook Page, everywhere
5. Invite your existing community
6. Use Facebook Social Plugins
7. Use data to entice new community members to like you
8. Pay to play with Facebook Ads
9. Run a contest
10. Use social media monitoring to measure, analyze, and learn
Tip: Learn how to drive more traffic to your Facebook Page
1. Optimize your Facebook Page Info
Most of the time, the only thing people see from your company’s Facebook Page is the profile picture, cover image, and short description. Make sure your brand’s images and description are engaging, encapsulate what your company does, and encourages people to like your page.
Don’t stop there, make sure you fill out as much of your Page Info as you can. Select the categories and subcategories that best describe your company, include your website URL, list your address, phone number, and hours of operation (if applicable). All of this information will help your page appear in Facebook & Google search when people are looking for companies like yours, which can increase your Facebook likes even more!
2. Post engaging content
It’s important to post engaging, entertaining, and interesting content on your business Page. Facebook constantly updates its Edgerank algorithm, and rewards posts that receive engagement (likes, comments, shares) with increased reach. Facebook will reward your content by letting your engaged users’ friends know on their newsfeed that they’ve engaged with your content.
Recently Facebook announced that it will update its algorithm to track how long users spend reading posts. Videos are the best type of content to post on Facebook for capturing attention and driving engagement. But make sure the videos are at an optimal length to grab your followers’ attention and keep it long enough to digest the content.
3. Be active
People are unlikely to like your Facebook page if you don’t post regularly.
How often should you post? There is no magic number but many best practice guides suggest 3x a week to once a day.
You can also use your Facebook Page Insights and check out which days (and times of day) your audience is active on Facebook. Click on Insights > Posts > When You Fans are Online to find this information. Post at peak times when your audience is online and experiment with the timing of your posts to gauge when the majority of your followers are engaging with your content.
4. Promote your Facebook Page, everywhere
Once you’ve got great content on your company’s Facebook Page, make sure you share your Facebook presence on all evergreen content you own and manage.
For example, promote your Facebook Page on your website (homepage, plus header or footer), your e-mail signature, marketing e-mail footers, business cards, and all other digital marketing materials.
Make sure to make it as easy as possible for your audience to get to or like your Facebook Page with one click. More on this below in #6 “Facebook Social Plugins”.
5. Invite your existing community
You have a community that’s easily within reach: employees, current customers, business & industry partners. They are likely to be your first advocates and find your content interesting and shareable. Why not send a friendly personal invitation to ask them to like your company’s Facebook Page if they haven’t already?
One way to do this is by simply adding a call-to-action in a personal e-mail (i.e. “P.S. Like us on Facebook“). Add a slide at the end of your presentations or webinars to encourage customers and business partners to remind them to like your Facebook Page, if they haven’t already.
For internal advocates, work with HR to make sure that your company’s Facebook page (and other social channels) are promoted in the new employee orientation and in any internal communications (e-mails, intranet pages, etc).
In addition, Facebook offers a Suggest Pages tool. When logged into Business Manager, click on Use Page > … (the ellipses button at the bottom right of your cover image) > Suggest Page. Connect an e-mail service or upload a .csv of e-mail contacts to send them an invitation to like your Page.
Make sure you upload or connect to an owned list of contacts that you or your company have an existing relationship with (and not a paid ‘lead’ list). The suggestion message can come off as spam to people who don’t know you personally and leave a bad first impression.
As for your industry ‘buddies,’ find their Facebook Pages and Like them as your brand. To do this log into in Business Manager > click the Use Page button > click the Use Facebook As Your Page link (top right, in a skinny grey bar). It’s a great way to Like your industry partners, colleagues, & other influencer brands. Plus you’ll be able to view your News Feed as your brand and keep watch on what’s happening in your industry on Facebook.
6. Use Facebook Social Plugins
As we suggested earlier to promote your Facebook Page on your website, you can do so with some free Facebook Social Plugins:
The Facebook Page Plugin lets you easily embed and promote your Facebook Page on your website. Just like on Facebook, your visitors can like and share the Page without having to leave your site.
The Comments Plugin lets people comment on your site’s content using their Facebook account. If people wish to, they can share this activity with their friends in News Feed as well. It also contains built-in moderation tools and special social relevance ranking.
7. Use data to entice new community members to like you
This step goes hand-in-hand with #2 “Post Engaging Content” and helps inform your overall content strategy.
You’ll need to use a specialized, data-driven tool. For our purposes, I’m using Meltwater’s media monitoring platform to illustrate an example.
Let’s say I have a pizza brand. To learn more about my target audience’s interests, I create a social search for “pizza.” Based off my search data, people who talk about pizza also talk about wings, food, cinnamon, crust, and hot dogs. Also, it looks like the hashtag #itsfoodporn is also associated with people into pizza.
This information is great to have when you’re wondering what to post on your Facebook page. By posting content that your audience is interested in (for example, sharing a photo of wings + pizza with the hashtag #itsfoodporn) your audience will share your Facebook post with their friends and help you get more reach.
8. Pay to play with Facebook Ads
You need to pay to play in order to be seen on Facebook today. Facebook has a large assortment of ad products to choose from with some of the best targeting options available on social.
By utilizing the data you found above along with contact lists of your known community and the assistance of a Facebook pixel, you can get your content seen by the right people to build your Facebook community. Plus, all Facebook Ads offer the option to show a Like Page button to people who see your ad but don’t already like your page. Win-win.
Here’s a quick breakdown on ad objectives, which can ultimately lead to more Facebook likes:
- Boost your posts – get your content in front of the right people. Target by interests or upload your owned contact lists to show content to known targeted audiences. You can also test Facebook’s Lookalike audiences tool and create a target audience that shares similar interests and demographics of your current customers, prospects or Page fans.
- Promote your Page – find people on Facebook who are the right fit for your business using location, age, and interest targeting. Another great ad product to test the lookalike audience tool.
You can test and experiment with different types of ads to see what works best for your organization, and make sure you choose the option that allows Facebook users to like your page directly from the ad.
9. Run a contest
Companies run Facebook contests all the time to get build their audience and get more likes. If you decide to do so, make sure your contest follows Facebook’s Promotion Guidelines.
Some quick guidelines: make sure your contest is fun, easy, relevant to your audience – and encourages users to share their result(s) and participation with their friends. Don’t forget to utilize Facebook Ads to promote your contest. And If you use an app to run your contest, make sure it’s mobile-optimized.
10. Use social media monitoring to measure, analyze, and learn
Use Facebook Insights to find useful metrics on your Page performance. You can view metrics like reach, number of engaged users, engagement rate, and new Page likes. These metrics will help you understand what’s driving your likes and engagement so that you can adjust your posts accordingly.
Did I forget anything? Have a question about any of the suggestions above? Please add a comment and, if you like the post, feel free to share it with your friends.
P.S. Now that you know how to get more likes for your Facebook Page it’s time to make sure you increase the reach of your Facebook content. Read more about this in Get the Edge in EdgeRank: 5 Facebook Marketing Tips.
P.S.S. Don’t forget to Like us on Facebook if you haven’t already.
This post was originally written by Robert Rydefalk and revised July 10, 2015.
