Note – this blog was originally written in 2019 and now contains updates with some of our new favorite solutions.
With over 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is still the largest and most active social media networking website in the world. If you have an online business, it’s practically a requirement that you have a presence on Facebook. But just having a presence isn’t good enough anymore. You need to know how to grow your Facebook Page and build an engaged audience that in turn, grows your business.
Facebook, unlike other social media networks, restricts the reach of your content to your audience. This creates a unique challenge, making it more difficult to not only build an engaged audience but to also keep that audience engaged.
This means when you post something new to your page, only a small fraction of your followers will see the content in their feed. To reach everyone, you’ll need to Boost your posts and pay Facebook.
How to Grow a Facebook Page Without Boosting Posts
However, it’s still possible to reach most of your audience regardless of whether or not you Boost your posts. The key to this is engagement.
The Facebook algorithm likes content that gets a lot of engagement. In this case, engagement means people Liking the post, sharing it, and Saving it.
This signals to Facebook that the content is good, and the algorithm begins to widen the reach of this post to your audience. The key is to gain traction with engagement almost as soon as the post goes like. The more and quicker engagement a post gets after it’s posted, the more Facebook will widen the reach of that post.
So then the question becomes, is there a strategy we can follow to ensure most of our posts to our page not only get high engagement, but build us a following, and grow our Facebook Page?
5 Keys to Grow a Facebook Page
There are a lot of different things you can do to try and grow your Facebook page. We tried to boil them down to 5 essential points that should cover the most important things that will apply to almost any type of page and industry.
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1. Give your page more appeal: Set it up to be Liked
The first thing that you’ll need to have in place before you even start trying to grow your Facebook Page, is a page that’s appealing. We want people to want to follow our page.
How many times have you come across a Facebook Page and decided to follow it? How many have you decided to not follow? What were the factors that led to your decision?
Before anything else, the page needs to appear and be active. If users come across a page that hasn’t posted in months, then there’s not much reason they would want to follow that page.
In addition to being active in terms of content, it should be active in terms of users and followers. This is where the catch-22 comes in.
You can’t grow a Facebook Page without having followers already – in other words, social proof.
Here’s a few quick and easy ways to get at least some social proof and a handful a followers to start you off:
- Share the page with all employees within your company and encourage them to follow the page
- Share the page with audiences you’ve built on other platforms. Cross-promote your Facebook Page to those audiences.
- Share the page with your customers. The people who are most likely to engage with you are people who have done business with you. If you have a mailing list or a place where you can surface messaging to customers, link to your Facebook Page.
- Buy legitimate Likes: Buy some Facebook Ads and optimize for Likes or engagement. Spend $50-$100 just to get the base number of Likes to something decent before trying to grow your Facebook Page organically.
Now that the page is a little more active, there are other things we can do to make the page more “Likeable”.
The first is completeness. Ensure you’ve completely setup every detail and section of your page that Facebook allows. Don’t be lazy here. Go the extra mile and fill out every section possible in your page. It’ll stand out and appear more alive from other business pages that are simply thrown up without much more thought put into it.
Next, use your Pinned Posts and About section wisely. Use this as an opportunity to let potential followers know what kind of content you share. What can people expect if they follow your page? Why should they follow your page? Maybe there’s some exclusive access to contests?
Make your cover photo (preferably cover video) eye catching and make your page profile picture stand out. Remember, this is the first thing people will see when your page is organically recommended to people on Facebook. Does your profile picture and cover photo tell enough to people unfamiliar with your brand what your page posts and shares?
Better yet, if it’s not clear, feel free to add that information to your page’s cover photo or video.
2. Create a content strategy and calendar
Content is the core of growing and keeping an engaged audience. It’s the oil in the social media marketing machine. This is why it’s important to craft a content strategy around your brand that captures the attention of an audience that would also be interested in your product or whatever you’re selling.
For example, if you’re a brand that sells car parts, you can’t just post about your deals and things you have for sale on your store. Nobody wants to follow a 24/7 flyer.
Instead, you want to have a content strategy in place that will grow your Facebook Page with an audience that is also interested in your product. In this case, car enthusiasts.
What are car enthusiasts interested in? Videos of cars on a racetrack. Photos of people’s custom builds and modifications. The latest news in the automotive industry. Car memes.
So whatever your brand is trying to sell and no matter how boring the product you’re selling might be (or might not be) the content strategy you put together must be entertaining, educational, or engaging. Sometimes even all three. These are the three Es when it comes to a content strategy.
However, a content strategy means nothing without consistency, cadence, and a calendar. The three Cs when it comes to the success of a content strategy.
For consistency, you need to post to your Facebook Page regularly, even when it seems like it’s in vain.
Consistency also means cadence, which is posting at the same times and days every week. This allows your audience to know when to expect new posts from you.
Finally, a calendar is how you put this all together. You don’t want to be scrambling at the last minute to decide what to put onto your Facebook Page. Plan your content a week in advance, and schedule it ahead of time.
Don’t be afraid to reshare your best performing content and recycle a lot of your posts back into your content calendar. Remember that since the reach is limited, many of your recycled posts will hit followers for the first time, even if it’s been posted before.
3. Create content that’s engaging and shareable
With that, having the perfect content calendar in place is meaningless unless you program it with the most engaging and shareable content possible under your brand. To grow a Facebook page you need engagement.
Doing this is a lot easier said than done, and it’s very contextual. Some brands go all the way to creating tabloid-like content with click bait. Others understand how to use different media formats to keep their audience interested. And others are able to create very entertaining or educational content that’s unique to their brand.
However you do it, engagement is the key to success on Facebook. The Facebook algorithm loves user engagement. This means users commenting, sharing, saving, and liking your posts. If all your users do is click links in your posts, that might be great for you but it’s not so great for Facebook. People leaving their platform means less eyeballs on their ads. Facebook wants to keep people on their platform as long as possible. If your content signals to Facebook that it’s doing that (with engagement), Facebook will reward you with more reach.
More reach means more of our users (and other users) see our posts, which means we can grow our page.
Here’s some tips to create content that’s more engaging:
- Test different content formats, including video. Video has been shown to be the most engaging format on Facebook, so take advantage of it. Don’t forget to add subtitles on your videos as most users watch videos with their sound muted.
- Hook people early. The first line of text, the first second of the video, the very top of the image, it should all do something to hook the person in. If you don’t capture someone’s attention almost immediately, you drastically lower your chances of capturing it at all.
- Ask people to engage with your content. It sounds simple but it works. At the end of every post, tell people what you would like them to do. Give them a call to action. Ask your users to share, comment, and like on every post.
- Incentivize engagement. Some brands do this with contests or giveaways, other brands do this by responding to every comment they receive. If users know they might get something in return for their engagement (even if it’s just your attention), they’re more likely to do it.
- Create A LOT of content and diversify the content you create. You’ll never know what your audience will engage with the most, until you try it. Don’t allow your assumptions to drive the kind of content you create. Try to experiment once a week with very weird, unique, and experimental content. Also, create a lot of content. The more at bats you have, the more you’ll begin to figure out what to optimize for.
4. Use the right tools
There are so many tools at your disposal to help you grow your Facebook page. It’s all about making use of the right ones. You don’t want to become paralyzed by the choices. Instead, you want to choose the ones that are proven to help, and commit to using those.
Here’s our list of the necessary tools you’ll need:
A graphic creation tool
Our recommendation: Canva
To create beautiful graphics and images you no longer need to hire a freelancer or understand a tool such as Photoshop. Canva provides templates using the correct dimensions for every popular social media platform. This allows you to create quote graphics, infographics, banners, animated images, and a whole lot more.
A video creation tool
Our recommendation: Lumen5
As we mentioned earlier, video is extremely important when it comes to creating engaging content on Facebook. This used to be a time intensive or expensive process. Now, with a tool like Lumen5, you can quickly put together an engaging video.
Another great solution: Veed.io
VEED allows you to edit, stitch, and produce quality videos to promote your brand or business in a matter of minutes. You can edit, add audio, text to your video, add video effects, add logos/watermarks, and – perhaps most importantly – add subtitles to any video instantly with one click, without the need for manual annotation.
We really like the fact that VEED is completely free to use for any video under 10 mins! Basic and Pro premium plan exists for longer and more complex video projects is also available.
Start capturing your audience’s attention and convert misunderstood leads by editing, creating, and auto subtitling your videos today for FREE at VEED.IO
A social media management tool
Our recommendation: SocialBee
Like we said earlier, part of a great content strategy is consistency. You don’t want to fall behind when it comes to publishing. You want to put out great content on a regular and consistent schedule. Scheduling content days or even weeks in advance can help make this a little easier. There are many great social media management tools but we personally use and recommend SocialBee.
A growth tool
Our recommendation: Linkiro
Growing your Facebook page comes down to the fundamental things such as a content calendar and sharing engaging content but it also includes little details. Little details such as optimizing every link you share, getting more of your followers to click over to your site, and tracking all clicks you get. Linkiro is a tool that allows you to add a call to action to every website you share. If you’re a content curator or share interesting and cool websites to your audience, you can now reclaim some of that lost traffic with Linkiro.
5. Invest in your page
Ultimately, once you have everything we talked about above in place, there’s really only one thing left, and that’s to invest in your Facebook page.
This step is not for everyone, and should only be considered by people who think or know Facebook is the main source of traffic and revenue for their business. If most of your customers come from Facebook or your business has been built around Facebook, this is a necessary step.
Facebook, like every other platform, will only give back as much as you put in.
You will need to invest money, resources, and time into your page.
When it comes to money, it may be a good idea to invest in ads that surface content to your audience and audiences like the audience you’ve built. Ensure you’re embedding Facebook pixels on your website so you can retarget the visitors you get and create lookalike audiences off.
It may even be worth testing boosting posts that get some traction early on or that have worked well in the past. If you hit a homerun, extend the reach of that post with a boost. Or, turn that post into an ad and surface it to people that haven’t Liked your page yet.
Finally, consider outsourcing the management of your page. This is a late stage step but again, if Facebook is your bread and butter, you’ll want to multiply your content creation and programming efforts.
Your turn
Facebook is still a massive opportunity for small and big brands. While it has certainly become more difficult to keep and grow a Facebook page, the rewards that can be reaped are significant. Create, experiment, and test.
How have you found success growing your page on Facebook? What are some tips you’d like to share? Maybe you have some questions around growing a page on Facebook. Feel free to comment below.
