Nurturing your network and sharing information that is not always about your business is integral to having ongoing long term supportive fans on Facebook. But using Facebook Ads to boost likes is also a good way to start that online network & encourage 'blue link' word of mouth to growth. 
Nurturing your network and sharing information that is not always about your business is integral to having ongoing long term supportive fans on Facebook. But using Facebook Ads to boost likes is also a good way to start that online network & encourage ‘blue link’ word of mouth to growth.
After creating your Facebook Page a great place to start is to search for the current businesses around you that you’re networking with offline & any pages in your area that are relevant to what service or product you provide. Build strength in the possible ‘offline’ connection you could have with potential referral services. An article I wrote recently touched on this: Taking Online Marketing to Offline Networking. It will take the effort of continually sharing posts & responding to theirs on an ongoing basis but in the long term it will be worth the effort. However using this as a method to grow your ‘likes’ initially will take time, as unfortunately many visitors view ‘likes’ as a standard of how credible your business is. Promoting a launch offer using a landing Welcome tab is a great way to avoid visitors turning away.
Although, the best results long term, will come from the natural networking you create online, boosting the initial numbers to get word out about you can be done using Facebook Ads. Combine this with the launch offer welcome tab and you will see the numbers rise quickly. The big concern for many considering using Facebook Ads is how much it might cost. It is important to set up your Facebook ad campaign in a way to reduce the cost while sparking what kind of network you want to create to get business from. Using really niched keywords, location restrictions, age & possibly gender demographics will help you do that. You also don’t have to accept the cost rate that Facebook suggests to you & you can set daily limits on your expenditure to stretch your spending out further too.
Things to think about in running a Facebook ad campaign are:
– choosing whether to use a sponsored ad, pay per impressions or clicks etc. Sponsored ads work well if you have over 50 fans already as it acts like a ‘virtual referral’ by placing the ad in front of only your current friends fans.
– gender could be good if you think about who are the decision makers buying your service.
– restricting it to your local city location to build your network is also a great way to start because the offline relationships you create add ‘concrete’ to the online relationships you are developing & this then again acts like trusted referral business.
By being super selective you will reduce the numbers of people who will see it
– but keep in mind this is building a foundation of genuinely interested buyers of your service – not likes.
The other vital success to an ad is the image you display, the headline & description. They all need to be eye grabbing and curious enough to gain the viewer’s attention. Think what you can offer at cost at the front end (in the ad) to then possibly make further sales in the back end. Eg Like ME if you’d like 50% off a business logo design! This could lead into ongoing work such as business cards, letterheads, flyers etc…
The key to running any Facebook Ad or competition is you want to collect genuine business interests – not just likes – especially when you’re spending personal time & money on it. Make sure whatever you are offering is relevant to your service otherwise you collected the ‘like’ for the wrong reason.
If you’d like to know more information on when it is the most effective time to use Facebook Ads or run social competitions in your business, just fill in the contact form and I promise to respond. More than happy to consult on how to combine and use your Facebook welcome page as an all-year-round marketing tool and not just a pretty design seen once by fans too!
