How to make your Facebook fan page popular (strategy and tips)

If your brand or company does not have a social presence, you are missing an opportunity to connect with the millions of your clients on the various social media sites. More precisely, if your company or brand does not operate a Facebook account, you are losing out. One major question I hear social brand managers ask often is how to make a Facebook fan page popular.

The answer is not blunt and straightforward. In fact, each social media manager has his or her own strategy, tips, and tricks to achieving this. In this article, we shall examine some common, useful, and yet potent tips and tricks you can use to grow your Facebook fan page.

1. Brand the heck out of your page

Your page’s first impression plays a very central role in popularity. Fortunately, Facebook new timeline style bears this in mind. My advice to any brand manager looking to grow their audience is to brand the page.

Branding the page means using some ingenuity while creating the cover photo and avatar. Branding also means grabbing your vanity URL (a vanity URL is a custom URL. So instead of www.facebook.com/#pages/yourpage/000000451, you get a www.facebook.com/yourpage). You should also use a big profile picture banner instead of the normal profile picture.

2. Send bulk invitations and messages

The fact that you can send bulk invitations and messages to your fans and prospective fans is one of the advantages of having a fan page. This is especially useful if you have many Facebook friends who you would like to like your page.

You can even invite your email contacts to like your page. All you have to do is to upload a list of the emails to Facebook then those who are in that list who are already on Facebook will be able to see Recommended Pages. Those who are not on Facebook will not be able to see such.

In order to upload your list of emails through Facebook, go to the Build Audience menu (it is on the top right side of your Facebook Page) then choose “invite email contacts”.

You can invite up to 5000 emails at a time and up to 7000 emails daily; this is definitely a massively huge potential for your page.

Note: Using this feature requires some caution because it may turn into a nuisance for others.

3. Place a Facebook like widget on your blog or website

A Facebook widget on your website is the ideal opportunity to turn your web visitors into Facebook fans. A widget lets your blog or website visitors know that you are active on social media where they can connect and interact with you.

Adding a Facebook widget to your website is easy because Facebook provides you with the code you need to integrate a widget to your blog; check the code here (just paste your custom URL in the section with the URL https://www.facebook.com/FacebookDevelopers). A Facebook Like button (like to your page not post) usually helps you give some sort of social proof since it shows the number of likes and reviews if any. It also has some faces of your Facebook page fans. If you want to make people share your content, simply check how to add a like button to a post (most blogging platforms will have social plugins for that).

4. Post engaging content

A fan page’s main aim is to drum up conversation. You cannot drive conversation if your content lacks the ump needed to capture the attention of users. If you post engaging content, the more interactions you will garner. My advice for posting engaging content is to let your page niche guide you.

However, Facebook graph analytics indicates that jokes, posts with pictures, videos, cartoons and other mediums work best in driving interactions. In fact, most Facebook users consider text updates drab and boring. Using pictures and other mediums allows you to stand out and thus drive interaction, which leads back to visibility for your page.

5. Promote your page/post

If you don’t mind splurging some money to get some likes, you can promote your page using paid promotion. Fortunately, you do not have to spend thousands of dollars to promote your Facebook page. You can set your budget to as much as $200 and as little as $5 per campaign.

6.     Run competitions and ask for feedback

Competitions are an ideal way to drum up conversation and interest on your page. In fact, data shows that people love free things. Use this to your advantage. However, ensure that the price you give at the end of the competition is something of relevance to your page and improves on your brand.

You can also ask your current users the best way to drum up some engagement. Facebook data shows that questions drive more comments. The more engaging the questions are, the higher the chances that the conversation will persist and your brand page will grow.

7.     Fill your page with searchable information

This means ensuring that the about section has relevant keywords that make it easy for people to find your page when they search on Facebook or search engines. In this page, don’t forget to include, a link to your website, a brief overview of what you do and some other information that describes your business in greater detail.

8.    Promote your page offline

Don’t be shy to place your Facebook page on your car, brochures, receipts, flyers, printed ads, business cards etc.

9.     Cross promote

Use all your social media accounts to promote your Facebook page. Actually, you should add a link to your Facebook page in each of your accounts just to ensure that every tweet, post etc speaks to your target audience.

10.Be active

I can bet that you never post on Facebook pages that don’t seem to have much activity in terms of recent posts. Treat/view your page in the same manner. If you want to grow it, post more often; people are on social media to interact so interact with them on social media. The more you post, the easier it would be to attract new likes.