The Facebook Growth Strategy that Facebook Doesn’t Want You To Know

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🌱 So you’d like to grow your Facebook audience?

👍 You understand that growing ‘Facebook likes’ alone isn’t the end goal? (but know it can help you grow your business like this)

👍 You’ve had enough of investing in Facebook Ad Campaigns that return a few page likes?

👇 In this post we’ll show you how you can grow a relevant Facebook audience for 10% of what it normally costs.

The average cost per page like in the U.K is 45 pence, this strategy gets it down to 4.4 pence!

The Way Facebook wants you to grow your page ?

We have used Facebook’s standard ‘get more page likes’ ad campaign in the past and it does provide results.

It increases the number of page likes on your page, and as long as you have created a relevant audience for the campaign, it’s likely that these new likes come from potential new customers.

However… These Facebook ad campaigns don’t get you much bang for your buck. They cost 90% more than the strategy we share with you in this tutorial.

The Growth Strategy Facebook doesn’t want you to know ?

Step #1 Think Creatively About Your Target Market’s Interests

You may already have done some research into your target market’s interests, if not, think about it…Think of a current customer, what do they like? What are they passionate about?

For example, one of our clients sells aerosol sprays used to repair/modify car bodywork. The client mainly targets owners and employees of car body repair shops.

We knew the target market were interested in cars (Duh! ?) but the key here is to go one step further… Think of a specific niche area of that interest.

For this example, we had an educated guess that most car body shop owners are aged 45 – 55. That means their era of ‘cool cars’ would be in the 1970’s. What was the coolest car in the 1970’s? A Ford Cortina (Google told us).

Don’t worry that this niche interest won’t appeal to ALL of your customers, we just want to target a small portion of your potential customers with a post that is really relevant to them and links to your business in some way.

Step #2 Create a Shareable Facebook Post

The next step is to create a  Shareable Facebook post relevant to one of these interests (like the Ford Cortina example above). Here’s a few tips to ensure your post is more likely to be shared by Facebook users and therefore increase the reach of your post.

❌ Don’t smother the post with your branding.

😂 Use Humour and/or Nostalgia in your post.

☑ Ask Facebook users to share the content (“Share this with your friends who love [topic post is about]”)

➕ Ask Facebook users to tag their friends (“Tag a colleague in the comments who needs to see this!”)

It sounds simple but it works. We didn’t even use all of these tips in the example above and look at the results you get from a simple piece of nostalgic content!

Step #3 Create a New Facebook Audience

The next step is to create a new Facebook audience of potential customers with this common interest. If you’re not familiar with how to create an audience on Facebook, check out this great guide written by Jon Loomer.

To ensure this strategy works you need to do two things;

Thing 1: create an audience that most accurately represents your target market. In our example, we targeted individuals with job titles in the industry we were targeting, plus we ensured that they were in locations that our client covered.

Thing 2: you need to narrow the audience to include only individuals that are in your target market as well as having an interest in the specific subject of the post you created in step 2.

In our client example, we narrowed the audience to only promote our post to individuals that like ‘Ford Cortinas’. Plus we went one step further and narrowed the age range of our audience so that we only targeted individuals that were in their teens and twenties when the Cortina was most popular.

How’s that for Nostalgic content?!

Step #4 Boost the Facebook Post

We’d normally always recommend using Facebook’s Power Editor to create Facebook Ads. However, in this instance it would add no value as we have already created the audience (step 3) and the creative for the add (step 2).

Click ‘boost post’ on the post you have created.

Choose a button to add (if you want one), the audience you have created in step 3, a budget (£2-£5 will be plenty) and duration (choose 1 day). Click ‘Boost’ to start your Ad.

Step #5 Comment, Reply & Promote Engagement

Engagement is now #1 priority. As soon as your post is live you want as much engagement on the post as possible. This makes Facebook’s Algorithm think “Wow this must be a good post, we should push this post out to more users organically.”

Sorry, but you can’t just sit back and watch. As soon as Facebook users engage (which will happen if you’ve followed our steps) you need to promote more engagement. Reply to EVERY comment. When users like the post tag them in the comments and ask them a question. Every time you reply or encourage someone else to comment, the engagement from users doubles and Facebook’s algorithm takes note.

If this is done right, you’ll see a snowball effect. Once you get the ball rolling you can step back as users will start replying to each other rather than you having to engage them. On the post in our example we had lots of users sharing pictures of their old Ford Cortina’s in the comments which promoted more engagement from avid Ford Cortina fans! (Don’t forget these Ford Cortina fans are also the client’s target market).

2,859 reactions, comment & shares. 46,964 people reached. For £3 investment! Just 4,259 of these individuals reached were paid views. Once the ball’s rolling you can rely on organic views which made up 90% of our reach and engagement on this post!

Step #6 Invite Engaged Individuals to Like Your Page

So…how does this help you grow your page likes!? Great question, you inquisitive and slightly passive aggressive, imaginary reader…

Facebook now allows page owners to invite any individuals that have engaged with their content to like their page (simply click on the names of people who have reacted to your post). Invite every one of them!

In the example above, that allowed us to send a notification to almost 3,000 relevant Facebook users. In this example we gained 68 likes.

The average cost per page like in the U.K is 45 pence ($0.55). This strategy made our cost per page like just over 4 pence ($0.05)

THAT’s 10% of the cost of the conventional method of growing your Facebook page with paid ads!!!!

Step #7 Watch your Page grow & Repeat

Just like anything, there is no quick fix to growing your Facebook page overnight. To continue this growth you’ll need to consistently execute this strategy.

Some posts will do better than the Ford Cortina example, some will do worse, but as long as you follow these steps and repeat, repeat, repeat you’ll be growing your page much more efficiently than how Facebook wants you to do it!

What next?

I hope that the strategy outlined in this article will help you improve your Facebook page growth, but remember, increasing your Facebook audience is just one piece of the puzzle.

Likes on Facebook don’t pay the bills. ??

For the client included in this article we managed to pass on 7 warm leads for new business in the first two months of working with them by using this strategy amongst others. ??

🎯 I’d love to help you execute this strategy for your business, or your clients. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below and I’d be happy to help!