There was a time when I operated on just a small business budget. Being cost-effective, constantly pushed me to find ways to get the most out of my efforts without incurring additional costs. As a business owner and a digital marketing expert in Chandigarh, I know how important is to gain social proof and credibility while operating on a shoestring budget. Facebook is an amazing marketing platform if utilized correctly. Facebook Marketing is vital to thrive in the rapidly evolving digital marketing world.
As of February 2017, 65 million businesses have a Facebook page. And why wouldn’t they have it? Each day, more than 1.23 billion people visit Facebook. So, Facebook is a huge potential market to generate more engagement and conversions for your client – ultimately more business on Facebook. But, how will you generate that engagement within a little budget? The answer is- when you develop successful relationships with your target audience while creating a nice balance of organic and paid growth. This would, in turn, increase your Facebook friends or fan list for your client without spending a fortune.
How to Grow Facebook Friends for Your Client on a Shoestring Budget?
Growing Facebook friends for your client is not hard if your client already has a good audience base. But, if your client has just started a new brand page and needs to grow their Facebook page from ground zero- that too without spending much money, it’s going to be challenging for you.
In this post, I am writing down a number of Facebook Marketing strategies to help you grow Facebook friends for your client:
Optimize Your Page
Before, getting down to Facebook marketing strategies, let’s discuss a little on optimizing your page. If you have a brand new page or a product, ensure it looks appealing before you start promoting it across all platforms.
- Choose a search friendly page name with a nice cover photo of size 828 X 315 pixels with a tagline: Make sure that the page name you choose is clear, simple and discoverable. Make a good first impression with dynamic and recognizable cover photos. Also, a profile image accompanying your business name is required to help your business appear in search results.
- Add useful information in the About section: Here you can share your useful information like phone number, address, web domain, other social media handles and working hours. Add text with keyword-rich content to make sure your About Page is indexed on Google too.
- Backlink to your page: Wherever you can, link back to your page. With backlinks, your page will have a better shot to climb the search engine rankings.
And let’s get started with the strategies.
Populate your page with engaging content
Engaging content is a key to any successful digital marketing campaign. Writing quirky and exciting content each day while having a content strategy in place. Choose the right mix of content and post it in the right order. People like to be entertained, so you need to show them that you’re real and engaging personality. Facebook Live Video can also help you humanize the brand of your client as it lets people see behind the scenes. Consider mixing up the variety of content with engaging photos, links, videos, questions and posts, etc.
While curating and promoting yourself in posts, you should adopt a standard practice of 20% promotional and 80% non-promotional across all verticals. This all leads to your current page followers sharing your content on their personal profiles, thus helping you attract new friends, likes and followers.
Targeted Facebook Advertising
This is a great way to grow your friends on Facebook. Although, it may not get you huge fan base, but it would surely help you connect with the right people. As pages are free to create and there is zero overhead involved, a small portion of any advertising budget should include paid advertising on Facebook, which allows you to target whatever demographic you need.
You don’t need to overdo your budget as you can start with as small as you want. You can even stop campaigns at any time if you don’t like the results. This is the best Facebook marketing strategy if you want to see the results.
Pay attention to Facebook insights inside and out
Dig into your Facebook Insights and learn what each metric means and how to interpret the numbers. Most importantly, learn how to use the information in your Insights to make data-driven decisions about your Facebook Marketing. Evaluate what you’ve done right or wrong. Insights give you the valuable information about your client overall page performance, including data on audience demographics, reach and engagement. Here’s an example of Facebook Insights:
This data is categorized on the basis of demographics such as age, gender, city, country, device, which makes it easier for you to customize your content and improve your fans base.
Boosting posts
You can get more life out of previous posts by boosting. Click back on your Insights tab, check posts and then sort by engagement. Choose the post that got the most engagement and is still relevant. You can boost a post for as little as you want to help post stay on your newsfeed and generate more engagement to your page. Encourage your existing friends to share and like your posts.
Promote special events, offers and news to reach a new audience with targeting. This will increase your sales and conversions as well.
Use the power of visual facebook marketing
Everybody is pretty aware of using photos or visual content on Facebook. Visual content is eye catching and it helps maximize organic reach as this type of content is more likely to be shared. There are a number of ways visual marketing can help grow your Facebook page, ultimately increasing your reach and following.
- Use branded quote images
- Create the lifestyle and promo images
- Pull effective tips from your blog posts and put images on them
- Use high quality and realistic product images as it can increase post view up to 94%
Facebook marketing with effective visuals has become a force to be reckoned with on Facebook. You can use tools like Canva.com or PicMonkey.com to create simple graphics that are branded to your page. Use only a proven & audience tested text, large & eligible font, high contrast between text & background image and a logo to grab the eyeballs of your audience.
Right usage of hashtag
When you hashtag a word, you allow users who’re not following you to see your posts and content. So, it can be a powerful tool to promote your brand, business, product or service. The use of hash tags on Facebook allows capturing the attention of a new audience. To make the most out of hashtag, choose a phrase that will be easy to read and is trending in a particular area or niche.
The takeaway is to experiment with hashtags and find the ones that can generate a positive response on Facebook. Do not use more than two hashtags as it may decrease interactions. To create new and relevant conversation, use a hashtag when it makes sense. Do Facebook graph search to see if a hashtag has any traction.
Cross-channel Marketing
Cross-channel marketing is also an important part of Facebook marketing. And you don’t need to keep your Facebook page marketing to Facebook platform. It is necessary to build a new audience to your page. So, share and promote your Facebook page across all mediums like social media, email signatures, website, etc.
Other than above hacks, pop-ups are in rage these days. You can use pop-ups on your website or blog to convert visitors into your Facebook friends.
Also Read: Top Social Media Trends to Keep An Eye on in 2017
Final Thought
Increasing Facebook friend for your clients with paid and unpaid ways has gotten harder, but still it can be done. It will require agility and creativity in your Facebook marketing strategies to build a stronger social signal. The above tips will not only increase your Facebook fans or friends but became a leader of the competition.