Written by ContentPowered.com
The key to success on Facebook today is a large, dedicated audience. You need more people following your page, but those people need to be engaged. If they’re not engaged, all they’re doing is lowering your reach percentages by inflating your audience without providing value. This is, incidentally, why purchasing followers from a site like Fiverr is a bad idea.
If you want to expand your audience you’re going to have to get a little creative. Sure, the standard tricks with SEO, embedding your Facebook widgets and all that still work. They’re just the baseline of what you should be doing. For true success, you need to think out side the box. Try out one of these innovative tips.
1. Network with Other Related Businesses
This is particularly useful if you’re a local business, rather than an online-only business, but you can successfully network in either situation. The core idea is this; contact a business in a related niche and develop a team-based promotion.
For a local business example, consider a print service as a business. Maybe you notice that a lot of your customers are people coming in to get their family photos printed. You could reach out to local photographers and photo businesses and offer partnerships. If a user visits that photographer, they get a coupon for free or discounted prints at your store. This helps drive users from that photographer to your print service.
Some businesses have a harder time finding partnerships; this is where some social investigation helps. Listen to what your users are doing and look for common businesses they use. See if you can partner with those businesses to streamline the user experience on both ends.
How does this help you bring in Facebook fans? Both networked businesses share ad campaigns and traffic. You can even make redeeming the coupon require using a Facebook app, which in turn requires following your page.
2. Make Use of Personal Profiles
The first and most obvious way to use a personal profile to advertise your business is to blatantly post about your business. Use the @ symbol to tag your business page so other users can easily click and like your page.
Another option is to add your business as the place you work on your personal profile. This helps any user looking for your personal profile see your business in search results.
If you have any employees, encourage them to do the same; link their personal profile with your business page and occasionally mention promotions and other advertising on their pages. This isn’t likely going to be too effective – their friends aren’t necessarily anywhere near your target audience – but it might bring you a few new followers.
3. Join and Participate in Facebook Groups
There are millions of Facebook groups publicly joinable. Some of them are small groups of friends. Many of them are old groups with no active readers. A decent number of them have hundreds or thousands of participants, centered around a particular industry or topic of discussion.
Take some time to look for groups in your niche. Find groups of people discussing the technology you use. Find groups of people commiserating about a problem your products can solve. Find groups of people in any way you can rationalize the relevance of your business.
The key here is to avoid jumping in with an advertisement. Open with an introduction and participate in group discussions. Only once you’re trusted – accepted by the herd, so to speak – can you safely advertise your products. This makes it seem like you have their well-being in mind rather than your own self-interest.
4. Run an Interesting Contest
Yes, yes, “run a contest” isn’t exactly an innovative bit of advice these days. The trick is to run a contest that’s unique to your business, something only you can do. Everyone can give away an iPad, but giving away an iPad doesn’t benefit you; it just clutters your page with people who want a free iPad.
The first bit of advice for contests is to limit your prizes to something relevant to your business. Generally this means your product, but for if you have a particular reputation, maybe it’s a tour of your facilities or an insider look at upcoming developments.
The second bit of advice is to require some effort commensurate with the value of the prize. If your prize is a piece of software that normally sells for $10, you probably don’t need to require more than liking your page. If you’re giving away an expenses-paid trip to your headquarters, you should probably require some deep engagement, even video production or physical crafting.
5. Use QR Codes on Print Media
Unless your business is entirely online, with no print materials whatsoever, you probably have some influence of paper on your advertising. It might be as simple as brochures you hand out to local businesses. It might be direct mailers. It could be as simple as the business cards you hand out when meeting people in person.
QR codes are powerful because they’re essentially web links on print media, which can be “clicked” by scanning them with a smartphone. You can customize the destination of the code, just as you would customize the landing page of any link. In fact, if the goal of your conversion process changes, you can change the landing page for existing QR codes to maintain value to your old marketing materials.
Just remember that users scanning QR codes are browsing on a mobile device, which means the page absolutely must be mobile accessible.
Again, how does this help your Facebook user base? You might link directly to your Facebook page. You might encourage Facebook engagement through your landing page. It’s up to your creativity.
6. Use Social Listening for Brand Opportunities
There are several software suites available that monitor ongoing conversations on social media and allow you to search via specific keywords. The idea here is to use these services for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and whatever other social sites you want to monitor. Look for mentions of your brand that aren’t tagging you. Look for problems you can solve for users if they only knew about your software. Look for anything that might be an opportunity to step in and offer your services.
Facebook limits your available outreach as a way of filtering spam for users, but you can bypass this by posting some quality content directly on Facebook, like in a Note or via an App. Then use your website to approach users on social media, and link to the content on Facebook.
7. Play Off Industry Thought Leaders
Like it or not, you’re not alone in your industry or your niche. There are other people active in your arena, and many of them may have a position of higher authority than you have. Monitor what they have to say and riff off it in your own writings.
The idea here is to write a response to their post, post it on Facebook, and tag the thought leader. They’ll probably come and comment, and they’ll bring some of their audience along for the ride. If your comments are insightful, they may promote your page on their own page to share them.
8. Interview Influential People
If you’re interviewing someone, you’re trusted by the average reader. After all, you have to be an authority for someone to grant you an interview, right? Conversely, if you’re granting someone an interview, you’re trusted by the average reader. After all, you have to have ideas worth sharing if someone wants to interview you, right?
Whether you’re on the giving or receiving end of an interview, the content is beneficial and can form a meaningful relationship between you and the other party.
9. Gate Excellent Content
Have excellent content? Want more Facebook users? Post that content behind a social locking tool and require a Facebook like to access it. It’s simple, it’s fast and it works. The only caveat is that your content absolutely needs to be valuable enough to be worth restricting, otherwise your new readers will feel scammed and will remove their follow.
