Six Surefire Ways to Increase Your Facebook Like Count

By
Colin
– 09/20/2011Posted in: Facebook Marketing, Featured, Social Media
Yeah yeah yeah, social media marketing isn’t about the number of likes you have. It’s about the ROI, baby! We’ve all heard it a million times. Don’t focus on likes. Don’t focus on followers. Focus on the dollar signs. Or better yet – focus on engaging your community members. Sounds...

Yeah yeah yeah, social media marketing isn’t about the number of likes you have. It’s about the ROI, baby!

We’ve all heard it a million times. Don’t focus on likes. Don’t focus on followers. Focus on the dollar signs. Or better yet – focus on engaging your community members. Sounds real good during the sales process, doesn’t it?

Problem is, for many brands it’s difficult (if not impossible) to generate the big bucks if they havent attained a certain reach with their social accounts.

Which is exactly the point in time when Facebook like acquisition campaigns become useful.

Think of this like e-mail. You spend time trying to grow your e-mail database because its a chance to communicate regularly with current and future customers who are at least moderately interested in what your company has to sell. The same applies to your Facebook fan page.

Here are six surefire ways that you can use to help grow your Facebook like count.

1. Give something away

This is the one of the best ways to quickly grow your Fan page like count. For the AAdvantage Mystery Miles campaign (client), we gave away 100-100,000 AAdvantage miles to everyone who liked the page and entered their AAdvantage number into a custom application that sat in a like-gated tab. The campaign resulted in heavy user participation and generated over 260,000 new Facebook likes and nearly 7,000 new followers on Twitter (among other things) – a nice collateral benefit to the promotion.

2. Offer exclusive content

You need to give potential fans a reason to like your page. The act of liking a page (much like submitting an e-mail address) is at its core a transaction. The user liking the page is giving your business something of value (the like) and you better be prepared to reciprocate. One of the best ways to return value is to offer your new fan regular or single use exclusive content. A song download, video, exclusive article series or useful widget works.

3. Run advertising

In many ways social media advertising is the neglected tactic in a lot of social media marketers toolboxes. We all know it’s there but we don’t always talk about it and we use it even less. But if your goal is to create scale for your Facebook fan page, advertising is the way to go. Ad campaigns can be optimized around social action, (such as likes) and it gets even more effective if you can run your campaigns around a like-gated tab which offers exclusive content (see #2).

4. Send an e-mail

Make use of your existing assets! Many companies spent the better part of the last decade trying to build up their e-mail databases. Send your database an e-mail announcing the presence of your social media channels. Depending on the size of your e-mail list, your mileage will vary, but you’ll be shocked at how effective this tactic can be.

5. Integrate with other advertising efforts

Similar to #4, your social media marketing efforts do not (and should not) exist in a silo. Leading brands will find ways to weave social elements into their existing marketing efforts. Maybe its as simple as using ShareSquare to generate a QR Code and a quick mobile optimized microsite to use in an existing print campaign. Or a clever final call-to-action in your print ad that leads a viewer to your Facebook page. Pepsi is the most recent brand to do this well. They integrated a Foursquare CTA with their Summer Fun ad campaign, which resulted in Pepsi being the top trending brand account on Foursquare.

Whatever you do, avoid simply slapping a Facebook or Twitter icon to the end of your 30 second spot.

6. Notify your employees

When was the last time you asked your employees to like your brand on Facebook? Chances are many of them do this without needing the prompt, but for larger brands this may not be the case. Your employees will often be your biggest advocates. Make sure they’re on the same page with your internal social media goals, and encourage them to interact with and help grow your presence.

There are many other ways that one could use to grow their Facebook like count. What are some of your favorite ways to accomplish this important goal?

Related posts:

  1. Why Your Business Should Create a Facebook Profile
  2. Four Ways Foursquare Can Survive the Facebook Onslaught
  3. The Dangers of Facebook Narcissism
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About Colin

Colin Alsheimer is an Account Supervisor for Weber Shandwick and the VP of Promotions for the Social Media Club of Dallas, among other things.