How to get more Facebook fans

Regardless of what you think of Facebook or the new pages, attracting quality fans is a great way to market your business. One of the most asked questions is How do I get more Facebook fans and likes?

There is a lot……. and I mean a lot, of so called experts and advice out there so I’ve decided to do my own little Facebook fans experiment.

The control week - Sat 26th Feb –  Friday 4th March 2011

Every good experiment needs a control so for the first week we did (or rather didn’t) do the following:

• I did not update the page status
• I did not use my page as my main profile
• I did not promote the page other than the widget on this homepage and the other social media sharing tools we already have in place.

I started with 378 fans and finished with 391 fans
On the website we had an increase of 24 new members.

 

Then I did this…..

Saturday 5th March – Friday 11th March 2011

• Everything that was updated or added to the page was tweeted
• I shared daily blog post and asked questions
• I promoted a different aspect of the website each day
• I promoted the membership of the website and a different benefit each day
• Posted links to some of the most popular archive posts

A few things I could have done (but didn’t)

• Use the PhotoCreative365 page as my profile and  post comments on other pages.
• Post images and give descriptions
• Tag people and my page in pictures

For many of these things I used HootSuite to schedule the posts as I was of course occasionally working!

Results

I started with 391 fans and finished with 398 fans

On the website we increased membership by 30.

Head  to Head

Control Week – New Facebook Fans – 13

Promotion Week – New Facebook Fans – 9

Control Week – New site members – 24

Promotion week – New site members – 30

Conclusion

What’s most interesting about experiments like this is that that do surprise you. Of course there are numerous extraneous variables to take into account but there are some things I’ve learnt.

• Although technically I’m ‘doing nothing’ on the Facebook page the Social Plugin on the homepage of the site seems to work quite well in gaining fans.
• Although there was very little interaction (although active users was up 120%) Facebook post views were up 1000%
• PhotoCreative365 site traffic went up about 30% with Facebook providing three times more traffic than Twitter (normally my top referrer).
• Interaction doesn’t happen overnight. You have to get people used to coming to your page and making comments.
• HootSuite’s bulk scheduling might be worth investing in to save time. I did take a while to schedule all the messages at optimal times and I wouldn’t want to do it every week!

• It might sound obvious but if you don’t post content then people won’t come to your page. Have a look at the daily active user breakdown below….. can you tell when I wasn’t posting on my wall?