10 Tips to Grow Your Facebook Fan Page
September 21, 2010 by Paris Permenter and John Bigley
Filed under Bloggie, For Bloggers
We hit a milestone here at DogTipper this week: we finally topped 4,000 fans on our DogTipper Facebook fan page! Although the numbers are nowhere near what you’ll find on some large pages, we wanted to share what we’ve learned about how to increase your fan numbers.
- Post an item to your fan page every day. Just like posting to your blog every day, posting to your fan page daily will show consistency. Consistency builds a fan base. Your daily FB post doesn’t have to be a link to an article of your own; it can be a photo, a link to an article elsewhere that you enjoyed, or a question for your readers.
- Encourage readers to “like” your fan page. We ask readers, both on the blog and through our Twitter account, to “like” our page, always including a link to the fan page.
- Get a short URL for your fan page. The default URL for Facebook fan pages is very long; it’s much easier to include a shortened URL in posts. Go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ to get a shortened URL for your page (once selected, it cannot be changed!) Shortened URLs aren’t available for new pages or for pages with under 25 fans (the minimum was 100 fans but we understand they’ve lowered it.) Our shortened URL is www.facebook.com/dogtipper.
- Promote your Facebook URL. We’ve added our fan page URL to our business cards and our email signature file.
- Consider a Facebook ad. We have a Facebook ad account for our fan page and spend just over $1 a day advertising the page. To set up an ad, click the “Promote with an Ad” link on the left side of your own fan page. You can set a maximum amount per day to spend and a maximum per click; you can pause or delete your ad at any time.
- Link to other fan pages. When we mention a company in our status box, we link to its fan page; on most fan pages (depending on how the administrator has set up the page), it will then display our status post with a link to our fan page. To do this, you need to be a fan of that page. When you type the company’s name in your status box, type the @ sign directly before the company name (with no space). You’ll see a popup box come up with fan pages you belong to with similar names. Select the one you want to insert in your status post. Here’s an example; Be the Change for Pets is a link to the Be the Change for Pets fan page:
- Use Facebook’s tools on your blog to remind readers of your fan page. You can click on the Applications link in the lower right corner of your FB page to be taken to the extensive Applications sections (which includes a lot of information for developers); we use the far simpler Social Plugins widgets. In the right sidebar of DogTipper.com, we use the Like Box with the stream turned off so readers see thumbnails of their friends that are already fans of the page. We’ll probably be adding the Comments widget next.
- Check out WordPress plugins for Facebook. We use the Facebook Share (New) Button plugin which allows a post to be shared with a reader’s Facebook friends and also provides a running count of how many times the post has been shared.
- Encourage fan interaction. We try to encourage fan interaction several ways; along with getting to know our readers, a Facebook benefit is that when readers show interest in your page by liking an entry or commenting on it, you’re more likely to show up in that reader’s Facebook feed. We check the fan page several times daily and try to reply back to reader comments plus we monitor the page for off-topic commercial postings.
- Feed from Facebook to Twitter. When we first launched our fan page, we had our Twitter feed publishing on our Facebook fan page. It was better than a dormant page but it didn’t work well; the hashtags and frequent posting on Twitter were too much for Facebook. (You can opt to only feed selective tweets from Twitter to Facebook.) Now we have our Facebook feed bounced to Twitter. Here’s an eHow article about how to set up the feed. (Another test we tried and dropped: we originally had our blog’s RSS feed going to Facebook so it automatically published a link to new posts. We found we had much better interaction and traffic when we added a status note and a link ourselves.)
And one caveat: Be wary of running Facebook-related contests. Facebook has strict rules about contests and giveaways associated with Facebook. You’ll see many giveaways that say “for an extra entry, become a fan of our page” but this is against Facebook rules. Here’s a good post by Susan Getgood and one by Mari Smith about the Facebook rules that went into effect late last year. Basically you can run a giveaway through Facebook using an application such as Wildfire but you can’t have readers become a fan as a way to enter. We used Wildfire once to run a giveaway through our fan page; it grew our numbers somewhat but it is a little pricey for us since we run weekly giveaways.
Our Facebook fan page has been a great way to get to know our readers, to obtain ideas for new content, and to grow a fan base!
About Paris Permenter and John Bigley
DogTipper publishers Paris Permenter and John Bigley are a husband-wife team of full-time writers. The couple has authored over two dozen books and 2,500+ magazine articles.
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