Facebook likes on your page serve as social proof of your standing in the local community. Plus, having a popular Facebook business page with plenty of engaged followers can also help your standing in the Facebook algorithm – meaning your posts are more likely to appear in the feed organically.
If your page likes have stagnated or you’ve just set up your page and don’t have any page likes yet, you might be wondering how you can improve your numbers. So, to help you out, we spoke to our iRealty Pro marketing experts for their advice on fast and easy ways to increase your page likes.
A quick caveat before we start though! – When it comes to page likes you should always be aiming for quality followers, not just big numbers. By quality, we mean followers who will engage with your brand and your posts organically.
Here’s how to do it!
This may seem like an obvious solution but it bears repeating. Facebook favours ad content over organic and this applies to increasing your page likes as well.
One option is to directly advertise for new page likes. Facebook will optimise the call to action in this ad type so users can like your page directly from the ad. This can be a great tool for a quick boost in numbers to your page, particularly if you’re just starting out and wanting to move that dial above zero!
Running Facebook ads with different objectives can also help you to slowly increase your page like numbers. Often boosting posts for extra reach or engagement, running traffic campaigns to send more users to your webpages or even campaigns for lead generation can increase your likes so it’s a great way to kill two birds with one stone.
Inviting people to like your page is a quick and cost-effective way to increase likes on your page.
When you first set up your business page, you’ll have the option to invite personal friends to like your business. Similar to advertising for Facebook page likes, this is a great way to quickly build social proof. Your friends are far more likely to become an engaged audience immediately, helping your standing in the algorithm as you get started on Facebook.
But, this isn’t the only invite you can send out to increase your page likes.
Facebook also offers the opportunity to invite users who have engaged with your posts to like your page. All you have to do is click to view the likes and reactions on any of your posts, and Facebook will display each user with the option to invite them to like your page. Just hit that invite button. Simple!
An invitation strategy we recommend is to boost your posts for higher engagement and then invite new users engaging with that boosted content to like your page. With this strategy you can be more sure of the quality of your new followers because they’ve already engaged with your content.
Another way you can introduce your Facebook page to more locals is to collaborate with local businesses for content.
You could host a competition with a local restaurant, sharing the posts across both yours and that business’ page and making sure to tag each other. This will introduce you to a whole new community who you know are locals.
If you want to test the waters without diving straight into a competition, there are other ways you can work with local businesses. The simplest is to tag. The next time you have a meeting with a client at your favourite coffee shop or take the team out for after work drinks – Take a photo and tag the page of the local business. These posts often get shared across, helping you to reach a larger local audience.
Shareable content on days like National Small Business Day with your favourite local businesses tagged or even a monthly local highlight can also be used similarly.
If you have regular visitors to your website, or contacts consistently opening your emails then it’s likely those people would also be highly interested followers on your Facebook page.
Best practice in your email marketing is to place your social media buttons in either your header or footer. This keeps them from interrupting your key email marketing messages, but places them in a spot where we’re generally used to seeing contact information, so curious contacts will still seek them out. These should be included in every email you send.
You can go further to make your social media presence more prominent in newsletters. A ‘join our community feature’ in your newsletter displaying three or four of your latest posts is a great way to showcase your page!
The same reasoning applies for your website. Your social media pages shouldn’t be the star of the show here, but it’s now an expectation that they will be available on your website. These are best placed in your footer with further ways of contacting you as in the example below.
There are plenty of simple ways you can start growing your Facebook page! But remember the key to keeping your followers engaged is to post consistent engaging content. Learn more about our full suite of social media solutions to kick your social media goals.