If you’re one of the 15 million businesses on Facebook, you’ve already made the first step towards establishing a presence on social media. However, managing your brand page takes time and effort, and you’ll need to be committed for the long term lest your page fade into obscurity. Growing your audience on the world’s largest social network, as well as keeping them engaged, requires a persistent effort.
1 – Use Consistent Branding
Every successful brand represents itself with a certain style and voice, and these need to be consistent across every platform you use for your marketing efforts. For example, people will come to recognize you not just by your logo, but also by the colours you use and the style of your written content. For your brand to become successful, you need to work hard to give it a distinct human face, particularly in the case of social media.
2 – Offer Incentives
By offering a small incentive to encourage people to follow your brand page, you’ll likely get a lot more attention. While you’ll need to work hard to keep their attention, offering incentives is a good way to initially reach out to a larger audience. One particularly effective method of growing your Facebook page is to run a contest, since this also serves to encourage actual engagement with your brand. It will cost a bit of money, but it’s a great way to establish an audience quickly.
3 – Share Original Content
Content is king with any digital marketing strategy, and the vast majority of the time and effort involved in building up your brand on social media will be the creation and publication of original content. However, many brands make the mistake of being too promotional on their Facebook pages when, in fact, they should focus on offering genuine value to their target audiences. Be sure to diversify your content by sharing stories from sources other than your own and by using a variety of media formats.
4 – Integrate Social Media
Businesses need to make every effort to integrate social media into all areas of their digital marketing strategies. Adding social sharing buttons to your blog, website and any other online content is a good place to start. However, to further raise awareness of your brand page, you should also add it to your email signature, to your business card and any other online or offline publications you maintain. You can even leverage your own personal profile to further draw attention to your brand page.
5 – Invest in Paid Advertising
Facebook provides many options for paid advertising, and given that recent Newsfeed algorithm changes decreased the reach of unpaid promotional content on brand pages, paid advertising has become even more important. To reach out to more followers, try using Facebook’s Sponsored Stories. This campaign will advertise your brand page to friends of your current fans, providing social proof of your active presence on the network.
Although the above tips will help boost the size of your audience, it is important not to put too much weight in the number of likes alone. After all, getting people’s attention is only half of the battle. The biggest part of the job is yet to come; holding onto your audience and making sure your content is engaging enough for them to stay interested. A like means nothing unless it is followed by shares, comments and, ultimately, conversions.
