How to Quickly Get More Facebook Fans Without Advertising

I gave a presentation this week on the topic of getting started with Facebook marketing (yes, this is still new to a lot of people). Anyway, one of the slides in the presentation (see below) was about how to build your fans on Facebook.

Whilst I don’t have time to explore all the techniques mentioned in the one article, I wanted to share a couple of hacks with you that you can use to quickly build your fan base using the On-Page Fan Building Functionality.

Now I usually point out at this stage that fan numbers are not the be-all and end-all of Facebook marketing, but it stands to reason that the more fans you have, the more chance you have of your ideal customers being in there somewhere, so proactively growing your fan base is definitely worthwhile.

#1 Invite Your Friends to Like the Page

There are a couple of places that you can invite your Friends to like your page from your page. The first is accessed by clicking on the three small dots to the right of your ‘Message’ button. From here select ‘Invite Friends’, and you will be able to scroll through your friends list and invite whoever you want.

There is not a quick way of inviting everyone at once, so you will have to go through your entire list (you can also search for the names of individuals) of friends and manually invite whoever you want to like your page. The good news though is that it does not need to be done in the one sitting. You can come back any time you like and when you select the ‘Invite Friends’ option, those that have already liked your page and those that you have previously invited, will be greyed out so you can’t invite them twice.

The second way to invite your Friends to like the page is accessed via the down arrow to the right of the ‘Promote’ button on the right-hand-side of your page. This essentially takes you to exactly the same place as above, it’s just another way of getting there and as Facebook are fond of changing things up from time to time, there is a reasonable chance that one of these methods will disappear without warning one day, so it’s handy to know about both.

Before you head off and start inviting everyone and their son to like your Facebook page, it’s worth bearing something in mind. This can be both a good and a bad thing to do. Let me explain!

If you invite a whole lot of people that are not your target market to like your page, yes you will get a few extra likes out of it, but as I said above ‘Likes’ can be a bit of a vanity metric. What’s more important is engagement, so if you have a lot of fans that have no interest in the content that you are putting out there, they are unlikely to interact with your posts. That can negatively impact whether or not your ‘genuine’ fans see your content, because Facebook thinks that your content is not interesting.

I would suggest you use this technique sparingly and only invite Friends who you genuinely feel would have an interest in your product or service. That way you will gain relevant likes from people who are more likely to engage with your content on a regular basis.

#2 Invite people who have reacted to your posts

Whilst the potential problem with the above technique is that it is largely untargeted (you don’t necessarily know whether Friends are interested in your content), this next technique will give you access to a super-targeted audience, that has already engaged with your content.

Before I explain how to do this technique, it’s worth just stepping back a bit to explain that people don’t need to be a fan of your page to have liked your content or reacted to it. Perhaps they have seen a notification that a friend has commented on or liked a post, which they check out and also click ‘like’; or they see an ad in their newsfeed which they like. Whatever the reason, they can react to the post without being a fan of that page.

Well, you can now invite people who have reacted to your posts (including sponsored posts) to become a fan of your page and here’s how it’s done.

• Scroll through your page’s newsfeed looking for posts which people have reacted to. It’s best to do this regularly, so people are more likely to remember your post, rather than inviting people a month later, when they may very well have forgotten that you exist.
• Click on the reaction icon (or icons) just above the comments section, which will then open a pop-up box containing the names of everyone who reacted to your post, and there will be an ‘Invite’ button next to the names of anyone who has not already liked your page. People who have already been invited or have previously liked your page will be greyed out, so you won’t invite them twice.
• If there has been more than one type of reaction to your post, you will be able to select the ‘All’ tab to see everyone that has reacted to your post.

Conclusion

Of course fan-building is only one part of a successful Facebook strategy. Don’t forget that you also need to make sure that you are regularly producing good quality content, to keep your fans engaged once they have liked your page. Have fun and feel free to let me know in the comments below, how many new fans you got with these techniques.

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