How can we encourage people to like our page when we start and don’t yet have a large network? These questions come up very often, especially in our Facebook Group. We all know that Facebook is a great opportunity for the promotion of our business. The statistics were recently shared by Facebook. According to a study, Facebook is one of the best ways to increase visibility, especially at the local level:
“For 63% of the SMEs questioned in France, Facebook represents the best service for interacting and strengthening its links with local communities. “
Most of them say that they consider Facebook, a key social network in marketing strategy. I think now I no longer need to convince you to use this social network? The question still comes up: how do you make yourself known on this social network which already has millions of SMEs from the different countries?
Obviously, the beginnings are always difficult and sometimes long but there are many tips that will allow you to make yourself known more quickly.
In this article, I will go over the various free methods to promote your Facebook page. To write this article, I did a lot of research. Certain methods I already knew and I applied them at home. However, there is a part which I had not thought of and which are, I find, very relevant to put in place.
Table of Contents
Invite friends to like your page?
We are creating our corporate Facebook page. We chose the banner, a beautiful name, a beautiful description … but nobody follows us on this page. What are we doing wrong? Where are we missing?
We invite our friends to like the page! I believe most of us have. But is this method really effective? Will the fact that our husband, brother, sister and uncle liked the page help us to develop our turnover? The answer lies above all these questions that must be asked before creating the page.
Please note, I am not against inviting people from our personal network, but it must be done after people start engaging on your page already. We can invite those who would be interested in our content, or people who signed up to help us increase our visibility.
Share the page on your website
If you have a website then you can share information about your business there. Even better, if you have a professional blog on your site, you must highlight your Facebook page over it. When you promote your page from your blog, it actually allows many new visitors to connect with you via Facebook.
In this type of promotion, you have to ensure a good location of the “Like” button on your website, which will allow you to enlarge the fan group. How to do it ? It’s quite easy. You can do this in two ways: Manually or with a WordPress plug-in (If you are using wordpress).
Manually
Manually you have to go to the dedicated Facebook site. At first, you need to prepare the appearance of this window.
Go to the tools for Facebook developers and fill in the appropriate fields. After pasting the link to your page and setting the fields, you will see live, how the Facebook window will appear on your site.
You have the option to:
- Adjust the width and the height
- Use a smaller header
- Hide cover photo
- Show some faces of your fans,
- Adapt to plugin container width.
Check that the width and the height adapt to the place where you paste your window (I use this option, I never enter the dimensions in the pixel windows).
Then we click ‘Get Code’ button to retrieve the code and then you can add this code to your wordpress website using widgets option. Let’s see how ?
First you choose the “text” widget in which you insert the code in the “text” part. Then you place it in the desired location on your website. You can opt for any place on your website but I would recommend you to put it in the sidebar. So it will appear on every post of your website.
Plugin for Facebook page like
There are many. You have the choice and opt for a pop-up that will encourage people to like your Facebook page.
I personally like WordPress Facebook Like Box Widget plug-in that does the same job as the manual solution.
However, just inserting your Facebook page on the site is not enough! You have to give a reason to people so that they also follow you on this platform. For example, they can follow you on Facebook so as not to miss other important information that you share there.
Good graphics is the key of promotion
Be it facebook cover page or profile picture, every graphic brings value to your brand. The more professional graphic you have, the more trust you can build among your audience.
Have a very professional logo designed and then use it with all the images you are posting over social media.
Right title and right time
Have you ever wondered, publishing the post on a Saturday night can bring a lot of attention to your post ! Well, I have tried many times when the timing of my post was aligned with people’s free time, its performance was extraordinary.
A perfect time is 8 PM -10 PM (Saturday) of the country you are targeting to. People at this time are likely to find your post in their newsfeed so quickly and there are high chances that they will share it with their friends.
Moreover, the title of the post matters a lot. If you have a very catchy title, people are more likely to read it.
Hashtag is always a reward to your post
Just using right hashtags may help your post to reach to a completely new audience. All you have to do is to search Facebook for related hashtags.
Do you know, Facebook search can bring you all the posts related to a hashtag ? Well, this is the key idea behind using hashtags. They are searched and used across the community.
Images and Videos
The modern world is more interested into graphical information than a textual one. People are more likely to watch your videos and therefore a video a week is the principle of the current era. Apart from vidoes, all your posts must have images representing the intent of the post.
Sharing is Caring!
Sharing is what can help your post to reach more people. Help people to know that ‘How sharing of this post can help the community !”. Once you inspire your audience to share the post and the post is really worthy, people will share it.
Facebook Group is need of hour
While Facebook is promoting groups so rapidly, people are also becoming more active in groups. There are groups which have tons of people active. Just find out one which matches the interest of your business and join it as page and not as a personal profile.
And I would suggest if you can create a group and keep your audience connected for any cause, probably that will be the best platform for you to promote your own products.
Call of action
If you want your audience to engage in your posts then please ask them a question in the post. You can also ask them to click on a link to see a very exciting deal or something which can add value to them.
They will take action and finally giving your post a better engagement.
Invite people
Once people start like liking your post, you can invite them to like your page. For doing this, you need to just go the post which they have liked and click on the ‘number’ (shown below to the post title) which is the count of total reactions. You will see a window which will display the names of all the people who have reacted differently (liked, loved…) and with these names, you will find an ‘invite’ button. Just click on that button and an invitation will be sent to that person.
Post regularly
I would say, the frequency of your post matters a lot. If you have an engaging audience and you are not posting for a while then the audience will not be engaging with your posts anymore.
You can also choose to schedule a post if you are unable to post it regularly. Every 20 minutes on Facebook, 1 million links are shared, more than 4.8 million photos are downloaded and more than 760,000 updates are sent. The Facebook algorithm has changed and now our posts are seen only by a tiny fraction of our fans .
“The aim of News Feed is to show each person the most relevant information, so that not all of your posts are shown in their feeds. ”
Whenever people click on, comment on, or like your posts, Facebook will consider your content relevant to them. As a result, they will see your posts more often. Didn’t you know of a situation that when you commented on a post on a page, then its other posts scrolled on your wall for several days?
You are the best promoter
If you are a merchant, you receive customers on your premises, do not forget to communicate to your customers that you are present on Facebook.
For example: if you run a restaurant, put the address of your page in the menu. You can even be smarter and encourage people to leave a positive comment or opinion for a cocktail or a small discount.
It is a very good way to increase your subscribers and bring people back to your premises.
Have a QR code
A QR code is a barcode made up of pixels and which generally forms a square with a white background. It is becoming more and more popular and now you can see it on flyers, on business cards etc.
Indeed, this QR code allows you to quickly and easily connect to the address to which it refers. Just scanning the code with our smartphone sends us to the chosen web address.
At the time of writing, Facebook only allows certain pages to generate this code directly from their account. There is a range of options regarding the actions that users can take when scanning the code. We can choose the one that suits us the most:
- Automatically likes the page on behalf of the user
- Checks the location of your business
- Connects to a recommendation screen for the page
- Connect to your “Display offers” file
- Connects to a review page
The tool can be found in the “Publication tools” section at the bottom left.
Tag People
Content creation takes a long time. Sometimes we cannot afford to publish content with high added value because we are overwhelmed with work. As a result, work for the customer comes first and then we forget to work for us.
One of the first things we leave behind is Facebook.
You can always share interesting content, but that of other pages (in line with your business) of course. So you give value to your subscribers and by tagging the page or the person who created this post you can increase your visibility.
Email Signatures shall include FB page
This is the trick we don’t often think about. In signing our emails, in general, we share our website and our contacts. Why not also include the link to our page. It’s quite easy. If you use Outlook for the management of your emails you can follow the tutorial from Microsoft.
You can also add a little word that will encourage people to find you on your page!
Facebook Ads, Last but not the least
Create Facebook Ads and get the most of it. Yes, if your pocket allows this, nothing can be a better solution than Facebook Ad. You have all the customisations available for Facebook Ad.
You can choose the target audience. Target audience will help you to choose the demographics, interests, age, gender, and education you are targeting to.
Conclusion
Managing the Facebook page takes a long time. In the beginning, we are always a little desperate because we don’t have many subscribers. This is an element that can quickly discredit us in the eyes of our prospects.
This is why many entrepreneurs rush to buy “likes” or try to earn likes through contests. Unfortunately, by doing so, we make it even more difficult because these “subscribers” will never interact with our posts, and, most certainly, they will not buy anything from us.
There are many other ways to increase our Facebook subscribers. In this article, I have cited some of them, but there are still others. Sometimes it just takes a little creativity.
Having all these ideas in place, now I will be interested in knowing your opinion in the comment section.
Aside from being an engineer, I am a software developer, an enthusiastic musician, a regular reader and a hobbyist writer. I love traveling, exploring new places and, of course, playing games (all sorts).