Marketing a business on Facebook is expensive if you are starting from scratch, but there are 2 methods our agency has been using for over a year that will help you build a free following on Facebook.
As disappointing as it is we do tend to assess a business’ credibility by the number of likes they have following them. We forgive them a little if they have just started out, but as the year rolls around, and the business or consultant has only managed to gather 300 likes, you cannot help but be cynical about whether they are sharing anything of value. Most people with a profile have more friends than that!
For many businesses who cannot afford to focus their advertising budget on setting up social campaigns we discovered over a year ago two features to help small business kick start and build free followers on Facebook. For those who follow us socially or know our clients you will be say to yourself ‘so that’s how they did it’.
Free following on Facebook feature 1:
The first feature to gaining genuine, legitimate, highly relevant followers, is really designed for the person who IS the business. They are a consultant, author or speaker and have made the decision to set up a Facebook Business Page to represent them.
Rather than selecting to ‘Create A Page’ choose to Migrate your Profile into a Page instead. This is a very simple easy step these days, because it literally just duplicates your Facebook Profile as a Business Page and all your ‘friends’ become ‘likes’ within an instant. Previously, doing this was a nightmare because you had to create a new personal profile, transfer ownership of any albums, pages, groups and friend anyone you wanted to personally stay connected to.
Now it’s a click of a button and all you have to decide on is a new profile and cover image, and fill out the business details. Your personal Profile will remain as is.
This feature is incredibly handy for people in the public eye, such as Authors or Speakers who were happy having people follow their personal profile, but now have a business purpose to use Facebook’s other advertising features, that are only available to them as a business page. By migrating their Profile into a Business Page, they don’t lose any credibility by starting back at 0 because they take their friends with them as Likes. Solves the arduous tasks of having to manually invite friends or pay to run Likes ads.
Free following on Facebook feature 2:
The second feature is less known by people, but if you have ever attended one of our Facebook workshops it is a feature we point out to help you organically grow your page faster than the average business spending a minimum $1 a day budget for boosting posts and running Likes ads. This method will triple your conversion from the $1 a day budget.
After posting and boosting a post to a targeted audience on your business page you obviously expect a higher level of engagement on the post. Usually this is likes, and because you boosted the post to be seen by a targeted audience, not all who liked the post follow your page. This is because they saw your post being advertised to them in their news feed – rarely do they ever visit your Facebook page. So here’s a feature we use to invite them to like your page.
First, click on the likes number under the post. A pop up list will appear with all the names of the people who liked your post. Now look to the right of their name – see the big ‘Invite’ button. Yep, click on that to invite these already targeted, highly relevant people to Like your page – for free.
Because these people have already interacted with you they are also more likely to convert. So you are literally getting more “bang for your buck!”
Of course you don’t have to boost your posts first, you can just select posts that have organically got a lot of engagement. But if you knew this was a quicker and cheaper way to target your potential buyers wouldn’t you invest a little money each week selecting to boost your best content???
So now you have no excuses to be well on your way to building a credible business presence with these two features to help you build a free following on Facebook.
