There are millions of businesses on Facebook promoting their products and working hard to increase their page likes. So what is the best way to attract someone to click your “Like” button when there are literally millions of other options? This blog will break down a few social media strategies to increase your following on Facebook.
Have A Strong Social Strategy In Place
There are many factors that go into creating and maintaining a strong social strategy, one of which, is frequency. Posting on a regular basis will help in spreading brand awareness and remaining active with your audience. Keep in mind, no one wants to follow a dead page. What would be the point? A rule for best practice is to post at least 3 times per week.
Nevertheless, what you post is equally as important as how much you post. A rule of thumb is to never post just to post. A profile gains followers naturally through sharing valuable information pertinent to its audience, as well as keeping its audience interested through engaging content. In other words, keep your posts interesting. Furthermore, keeping the character limit short and sweet has actually been proven to increase page engagement, which will help your overall campaign to grow your following.
Another incredibly vital component to keep in mind when creating your social page is it’s visual appeal. According to ADWEEK, 84% of marketing communication will be visual by 2018. That means that you will want to include engaging graphics and videos now more than ever, all the while making your profile look nicely cohesive.
Where should you start? Think outside of the box. Do you want to create your own videos? Incorporate gifs? Utilize slideshows? One brand who continually posts captivating video footage is GoPro.
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GoPro does a phenomenal job with creating their own videos, as well as incorporating UGC (User Generated Content). The example below is a video featuring a new GoPro feature while also showcasing a beautiful scenery that virtually anyone would enjoy. However, not every brand is as blessed with video assets as GoPro. With that in mind, there are plenty of other ways to easily curate video footage.
One way to do so is through creating your own gifs, as shown in the example below from EZ Contacts. In this video, the glasses move about the surface to make an ordinary graphic animated. If this does not suite your needs, surf for a GIF online that ties into your social brand and strategy.
What’s the secret to success? Testing, testing, and more testing. When one strategy doesn’t work, try another. Continue to keep an eye on how your content is performing. Once you discover what type of content performs best, keep at it and optimize. Every audience, industry, and brand will work differently. Once you find what your audience likes to see, you can infer that continuing to cater your content to them will result in an increase in like-minded users.
The Importance Of Staying Away From Being Too Promotional (& How To Hack It)
Constantly being promotional is like having a significant other that only talks about themselves. It’s boring, it’s too much, and it’s not going to fly for long. The best practice here is to balance your content on a 70-30 basis. 70% of your content should be fun, engaging, and valuable. This can include blog posts, quotes, videos, quizzes, enriching information, and fun content. If it does not inspire, educate, or entertain, it is probably promotional, which makes up the remaining 30% of your content. This includes sales and promotional product information. When in doubt, set your plan of attack to be value first, transfer your audience to your website, and let your web copy do the talking.
One way to squeeze in more promotional content while still increasing your following is to reward your followers. By giving exclusive offers to your followers, you are not only promoting your service and/or products more, but also creating an exclusive community that others will want to join in order to reap the benefits of as well. This is a great way to entice people to follow your page, as this ‘relationship’ seems more valuable to them than vice versa. Keep in mind that people are constantly being served ads and branded posts. In order to get that Like, you have to prove to users that your content is valuable enough to outweigh the ‘cons’ of following a brand.
Keep It Personal
People are on Facebook to interact with their friends and loved ones. By nature, Facebook is a personal platform for connecting with friends new and old. This is why it is crucial to stay personal. Embrace your brand story and history, share that with your audience and help them realize the people behind the logo. This will tremendously help people put faces to the name and feel a connection with the brand – and thus want to stay up to date on it’s status. Long story short, create a brand personality that your target audience will gravitate towards and listen to.
One brand who does a great job at this is SEALFIT. The face and founder of SEALFIT, Mark Divine, is constantly present on the brand’s Facebook page. This gets the audience hyped-up in admiration of Mark. They want to stay up to date with his advice, his workout plans, and his life. The users feel a connection towards him and thus the SEALFIT brand has become a community in which the following genuinely enjoys following, interacting, and working towards the same goal and lifestyle.
Boost Your Content And Run Invite-To-Like Campaigns
By boosting your content, a.k.a. putting money behind your posts, your content will be shown to your target audience with the goal of gaining more impressions and more engagement. With that being said, your content should acquire more likes than usual. By clicking to see who has liked your post, you will see which of them already like your page.
If you have under 100k followers, you will additionally be able to “invite” the users who do not already like your page. These users will then receive a personal notification from your brand requesting that they like your page. With such a direct request, your page will have a good chance at gaining that follower if your page meets the standards written above.
Too Impatient To Take The Long Way? Leverage A Social Contest
A social contest allows you the freedom to set entry requirements based on your needs. In this case, your social contest would require the entry step of liking your Facebook page. However, to let you in on a little secret, Facebook will not allow you to see just who has liked your page during this allotted contest timeframe due to privacy restrictions. If you care to really track who entered, you will want to set up additional entry steps. Keep in mind that the more steps you have, the less entries you’ll get.
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A potential additional rule could be that a user must share your Facebook post announcing the contest + rules. The strategy here is to get that user’s followers to also enter and share with the hope of starting a viral wildfire on Facebook. The sharing component will also increase your engagement rate, so you’re really hitting multiple goals here. Lastly, if possible, it would be to your advantage to collaborate with other Facebook pages and/or influencers to further extend your reach in promoting this contest and gain valuable brand awareness.
Make Your Profile Professional
If you don’t take your page seriously, no one will. To showcase that your brand is credible and intelligent, you’ll want to incorporate your overall branding everywhere. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “on brand,” and it’s overly used for good reason.
Your profile page should not only look good, but look professional with the same branding as your website. When you look at your posts, the fonts and colors should make simple sense. It either matches your packaging, website, logo, etc. Keep this consistent. A fantastic brand page that lives by this rule well is Coca-Cola.This page incorporates cohesive branding through their profile picture, cover photo, and posts.
Similar to connecting the dots between your website and your Facebook profile, you can also leverage your website as a source of social traffic. Add icons to your website that link to your brand’s social pages. If gaining followers is a major priority, you can also add icons to your order placement page and even at the bottom on your email newsletters. This way you have multiple opportunities to send traffic to your social page in hopes of gaining more followers.
Wrapping Up
Overall, there are two overarching ways to gain followers, one being the long term play of having a strong social strategy and the other using incentives (i.e. contests, exclusive offers, etc.). The best plan of attack is to incorporate both and, most importantly, care about your followers. If you leave this post remembering anything, may it be that creating a community is the most effective way to gain followers and keep them.
