How to leverage Facebook’s ‘Building Your Audience’ features to grow awareness of your Facebook Page
Social media training delegates and our clients often ask the golden question... ‘How do I grow likes on my Facebook Page?’
We’ve discussed in previous blog posts how strategy and having a good content pipeline, can and will, encourage people to like Facebook business pages organically, and, more importantly, keep them engaged – provided, you go about reaching your audience in the right way. The following two posts ‘ Content, Creativity, and Ingenuity 3 Key Drivers for Successful Social Media Engagement’ and ‘How To Make the Most of your Business Page – get those likes in’ contain some helpful tips that will help to ensure you are creating valuable content that will incentivise people to like your pages and then go on to engage through your page.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a golden ticket that guarantees to build your likes overnight. As with any social media activity (and indeed most marketing activities), it boils down to thinking it through, time and effort.
However, Facebook has made life a little easier for everyone by adding some features that should help to get your community growing – especially if you have created a business page through a personal profile. So let’s take a look at a few ways to grow those likes and drive engagement.
Building Your Audience
Firstly – you need to ensure that you are A) an admin of the page and B) accessing the Facebook Page via your personal profile and not directly accessing it as a Page.
Once in your Page (not personal profile but Page), you will see a tab in your admin panel, at the top right hand of the screen titled, ’building your audience’- (it’s nestled between ‘edit page’ and ‘help’ – and you will of course only see these if you are registered as an admin of this page).
This ‘building your audience’ tab is as close as anyone will come to finding a secret weapon when it comes to building likes.
When you click on the tab you will see three different options.
1) To Invite Email Contacts – If your page has less than 5,000 likes than you are allowed to import an email list and then invite email contacts to like the page. You can upload a file containing your email contacts addresses and Facebook assures that they will securely import them to your page. You will then be given the option to suggest liking your page to all of those contacts.
2) Invite Friends – This option allows you to suggest your page to all or some of your friends connected to you through your personal profile. This is where having a page connected to a personal profile is most beneficial. If there are some specific people you wish to suggest your page to, you could always add them to your personal profile and if they choose to accept your friendship – then go on to recommend your page to them. This feature allows you to target friends that might be interested in your business page by narrowing them down through their location, groups they are members of and networks they are part of. For instance – say your business is based in London; it would be a good starting point to invite everyone in your London network to like your page.
3) Sharing Your Page – This tab is pretty straightforward but very effective – it allows you to post a link to your page on your own timeline, a friend’s timeline, in a group or in a private message. Again, this is useful if you want to target specific people in your personal profile friend list. You can post your Page’s link onto any timeline that is friends with you. If you wish to be more discreet then you can private message it through to them as well.
The three ways of promoting your page, mentioned above, are useful for suggesting pages to other users on Facebook or in your email contacts list – but remember that spamming is never a good idea so use your suggestions wisely and in a non spammy fashion.
Posting your page on every friend’s timeline, inviting them to like the page and then emailing them a suggestion as well is more likely to discourage them to connect with you. It’s the same old advice – be strategic with your activity and plan how you’re going to approach prospective audiences.
Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire. The agency covers all aspects of marketing strategy and online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.
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