Everyone loves getting likes for their Facebook business page. Even if you don’t know anything about social media or digital marketing, it’s such a simple, straightforward metric to watch. Is the count going up? Good! Is it going up fast? Great! Going down? Uh oh.
Facebook page likes are valuable. Even if you don’t leverage them to increase sales, they still reflect well on you. It’s a form of “social proof.” Consumers are more inclined to trust a brand with a large social media following. It’s even better if your following publicly engages by liking, sharing, and commenting on your posts.
Engagement can be tricky to get going. You need lots of page likes. Very few Facebook users comment on posts. More people like posts, but even they’re a relatively small percentage. And it takes a great post—usually with an eye-catching visual—to get shares.
They key to engagement, and to being able to use your Facebook page to generate business, isn’t just to have a large following. You need people who are genuinely interested in your brand, your type of products or services, your industry, or ideally all of the above. You want real people who made the conscious decision to like your page for a legitimate reason.
Great things happen when you have a sizable following consisting of your target audience. You see increasing engagement and an uptick in leads and sales. So, here are some tips to help you get there by accumulating more likes for your Facebook business page from relevant users.
25 Ways to Get More Facebook Likes
- Post high-quality, valuable content (including videos and infographics!) that is of genuine interest to your target audience.
- Run page like ads on Facebook. You can test the waters without spending much money, and the platform gives you in-depth ways to target the users who see your ads.
- Invite your personal page friends to like your business page; ask other employees to do the same.
- Link to your business page as your place of employment on your personal page; ask other employees to do the same.
- Add a prominent call to action (CTA) on the pages of your website to like your Facebook page.
- Include a page like CTA in your professional email signature (and those of the other people who represent your brand).
- Put a page like CTA at the end of your site’s thank you messages, like those for making a purchase, signing on to an email list, sending an inquiry, etc.
- Use a page like CTA in your e-newsletters and other email marketing; people who subscribe to your content are just the ones you want connected to your brand on Facebook!
- Embed a link to like your business page in some of your articles or blog posts where it’s relevant, or add a CTA to the end of the content.
- Open up your blog posts to Facebook commenting (if you have a WordPress site, get the Facebook Comments plugin).
- Link to your Facebook page from your Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and other social media accounts.
- Don’t overlook offline opportunities; for example, include the URL of your business page on your company’s business cards and printed marketing collateral, and hang a sign in your store asking your customers to like your Facebook page.
- Fill out your organization’s short and long descriptions in highly descriptive ways that work in your brand’s target keywords.
- Offer coupons, a one-time discount or freebie, or other specials to people who like your page.
- Use Facebook’s “Insights” tool to see which type of posts and topics get the most engagement and post more of those; similarly, discontinue the types and topics that garner no interest.
- Show personality in your Facebook posts; people are more interested in connecting to the people behind a brand than something that sounds corporate or impersonal.
- When relevant, tag other business pages in posts; they’ll often share your content if it makes sense for them to do so, and even drop by to like your page.
- Approach other local noncompetitive businesses that would be of interest to your target audience about cross promoting each other’s Facebook pages.
- Post breaking news that’s relevant to your industry, area, or target market; such items tend to get more shares than most other types.
- Share a good mix of your own original content and high-quality curated content from other reputable sources.
- Refrain from being self-promotional in most of your posts; people are on social media to be social and connect with great content—not to be advertised to.
- Pay to boost your most popular posts to a targeted group of people.
- Host regularly scheduled events, such as user-submitted photo contests, real-time Q&A, or using Facebook’s live video feature.
- Engage with other pages by commenting on, liking, and sharing their posts from your business page; participate genuinely and thoughtfully—don’t be spammy!
- Like other business pages from your industry and tangentially related ones; you’ll get some return likes, but more importantly, you can find the ones using Facebook successfully and check out what they’re doing right.
