How to Promote Your Facebook Page and Grow Your Fan Base? – With or Without The Moolah

It was early 2004 when a 20 year old multilingual programming prodigy who was also the captain of his school’s fencing team launched a website from his dorm room in Harvard University. Eight years later this American genius would become the world’s second youngest self-made billionaire (the first being another co-founder of the website). In less than 100 months Mark E. Zuckerberg and his website Facebook revolutionized the internet and in the process the lives of the entire online universe. Today, the impact of his creation has started influencing the building blocks of modern human society affecting facets such as reputation, affability and ease of discovery for both individuals and brands. In fact if one can master the art of “How to Promote Your Facebook Page?” effectively, there’s plenty of money to be made as an advisor and consultant.

Originally launched as thefacebook.com, the first version of today’s social networking giant was just a detailed visual online directory of Harvard University students. Prior to Faceboook, Mark created Facemash by hacking Harvard’s student ID picture database in order to get pictures of students at the school in the nine different school dorm houses. Just four hours after he launched the site it had to be shut down as traffic skyrocketed. Another reason was the sharp criticism of the site’s use of ID photos and ranking students according to attractiveness.

Post the Facemash fiasco which happened in November 2003, the Harvard Crimson ran a feature analyzing the site in an open-ended fashion. When Mark Zuckerberg read through the article one paragraph in particular caught his attention leading to what can now be said as the “Eureka” moment in the birth of Facebook.

The potential benefits of a comprehensive, campus-wide online facebook are plenty… Thanks to a little bit of ingenuity and lot of illicit hacking, a Harvard sophomore was able to obtain a great majority of the campus’ photos and compile them on one navigable site. This was an invasion of privacy, but it is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized website is readily available; the benefits are many

On February 4, 2004 thefacebook.com was launched. On February 9, 2004 Harvard Crimson announced the launch in an article titled “Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website“. The article quotes Mark Zuckerberg’s response to the fact that 650 students had registered to use the site in four days; “I’m pretty happy with the amount of people that have been to it so far. The nature of the site is that each user’s experience improves if they can get their friends to join it.” Well, one can only imagine how happy Mark feels today given that Facebook is on course to hit one billion registered users by the end of 2012.

In the Social Media era, Social media marketing is no longer an experimental field. With fans 5 times more likely to make a purchase than non-fans, many “best in class” companies now view their social media activity from a strategic perspective (Source: Forrester Research). Knowing the best practices to promote your Facebook page is extremely important in today’s era irrespective of whether you run a Fortune 100 organization, a startup or a sole proprietorship. For individuals, the decision to abstain from being on Facebook is almost like social suicide and as per recent studies you could be labeled a psychopath and weirdo if you didn’t have a presence on Facebook.

For businesses and notably startups targeting people under 35 years of age, not having a strong presence of Facebook can be instant turnoff for your audience. If you are an entrepreneur looking to get funding for your bootstrapped business, then knowing the right ways to promote your Facebook page and having many thousand likes on it will certainly improve your chances of impressing your investors. So what are some of the best methods to promote your Facebook page and build a strong social reputation, lets find out:

Leverage Your Personal Networks

Effective networking both online and offline is more important today that it ever was before. Promoting your Facebook page 101 tells you that the first thing to do after setting up your brand page is to let your entire network of friends, family and acquaintances know about it. It is important to do this on a continual basis and talk about your presence on Facebook with even the new people that you meet.

Even though it seems kind of desperate and needy this is an effective method to promote your Facebook page without spending any money. The approach works well for small enterprises which are selling a service and involve face to face interaction with many people on a daily basis, e.g: Fitness chains and instructors, food and beverage outlets, niche social networks etc.

Utilize The Entire Ecosystem

MAKE SURE YOU LIKE US ON FACEBOOK FOR ALL THE LATEST HIP HOP UPDATES!!! | facebook.com/viewhiphop

— ViewHipHop.com (@ViewHipHopBlog) September 2, 2012

Now that the importance of your brand being on Facebook is established, it is vital that you make your presence on all other social networking platforms help you do better on Facebook. Integrate periodic messaging about your Facebook page on Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest.

Even better would be to get all your employees to add the URL of your Facebook page on their personal social media profiles. Again, this is a low cost approach to promote your Facebook page that will suit the marketing budgets of SMBs. If you are keen to test this out, then head over to this page on LinkedIn which allows you to get high quality Likes on your Facebook page if you can reciprocate them back.

Buy Some LIKES For The Initial Push

This approach is subject to intense debate and deemed as unethical by many. The factor of the matter however is that when ‘LIKES‘ start affecting your brand persona and social reputation they become commoditized creating a marketplace of buyers and sellers. It is thus not wrong to buy a few hundred or few thousand likes to get some initial visibility particularly if you are bootstrapping a new business with your own personal money.

A note of caution here is that this method to promote your Facebook page should only be used very rarely. Ideally, it should be used when it can truly help increase the visibility and success of your brand in the marketplace.

Develop a Facebook Ad Strategy

The best method to promote your Facebook page and get a regular steam of Likes is what Mark Zuckerberg would tell you if you asked him the question – “Run Facebook Ads“. It doesn’t come as surprise that spending money with Facebook is actually a very powerful way of making your presence on the platform stronger. They have developed a very sophisticated self-serve ad solution that allows businesses to run highly targeted advertisements on Facebook. You can run campaigns from as low as $10 and if your goal is to increase the LIKES on your Facebook Page then the net cost per LIKE normally comes to about USD 10 cents.

Likes acquired by running Facebook Ads are normally of a higher quality as those users are more likely to interact with your Facebook page. It should however be noted that interaction rates on Facebook pages vary between 0.1% to 1% of the total Likes depending on how much you invest on maintaining the page. Celebrities like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber have in excess of 50 million Likes and even those pages have an engagement rate of less than 2%.

Create Some Viral Content

Finally, while this is easier said than done, creating content that has a high probability of going viral can give a massive push to your efforts to promote your Facebook page. A handy tip here is to run low budget Facebook Ads or use the promoted posts feature whenever any content that is deemed viral is published on your page.

What did you think about these five ways to help promote your Facebook page? Are their any other more effective methods that you are aware of? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.