facebook likesIs it right to buy Facebook likes to build your Facebook Page?

Buying likes by going to one of those spammy sites that offers 1,000 likes for $10 dollars (or similar) is extremely damaging to your brand.  You will end up with a large number of fans and very low engagement.

Do you think it’s difficult for Facebook to work out what you did?  90% of your fans are from one country and no one from that country ever interacts with your Page updates?

Google has been very open about the fact that is it trying to get rid of spammers, which we have seen with all of its changes over the last couple of years.  Facebook are behind Google in this regard, but they will catch up. Part of this will mean they will implement more controls to monitor pages that have Facebook fans who are mostly fake.

However, spending money on Facebook to grow your fanbase is essential if you want to grow quickly.

I was speaking with a company in the UK last week and they showed their graphs of growth for Facebook fans.  When they were not running advertisements, their fan base was growing very slowly.  As soon as they ran ads to promote their competitions, their fan growth shot up.

So, what are some legitimate and useful ways of buying Facebook likes?

1.  Running Facebook Competitions

As mentioned above, Facebook competitions increase engagement on your Page.  More engagement means more fans.

For example, Antavo has a competition app with some viral features that encourage fans to share.  Antavo is a paid-for application so you are paying to increase engagement and awareness and, ultimately, you are paying for more fans.

When you set up an application with Antavo, you define the type of app you want, specify the imagery you want to see, update your text (in your language of choice), and then you set the viral sharing features.

 

Antavo
Users have the option of entering the competition again by sharing out details to their friends!

 

If a user sends out the link and their friend subsequently enters the competition, they get an additional five entries.  They have the option of sharing it out on Facebook, sending a tweet out about it or emailing a link to the competition.

As more people share it out, more people will become fans.  This is a great way of increasing your fans and, although there’s a cost involved, it is more natural.  You would expect that the friends of your existing fans could also be relevant people who are worth targeting.

When you are running competitions on your Facebook Page, you want to make sure that the prize is relevant to your target audience.  You only want to attract people who will make ‘good fans’.  Good fans are potential purchasers of your products and services, or key influencers who can influence other people to buy your goods.

2. Target email subscribers

When someone visits your website and subscribes to your content via email, that is a good person to also have as a Facebook fan.  They probably arrived on your blog and really liked what you had to say!  In fact, they liked it so much that they want to see more of it and gave you permission to email them on a regular basis.

So, these are people who are good potential fans of your page and, if you target them with an advertisement on the same day they subscribe, the conversion rates will be quite high.

The type of advertising you might want to consider setting up in this case is called retargeting.  This means that, after they visit one location on the web, you can retarget the same person in another location.  This is why, when you’ve visited an online store, you might see ads for that same store all over the place for a few days!

Perfect Audience is an excellent tool for retargeting on Facebook.  You can target a visitor on all pages of your website, or you can target just one specific page.  In the following screenshot, you can see that you select ‘path’ and enter the specific page:

 

Perfect audience setup 1
Set up Perfect Audience for a specific page

 

If you are building email subscribers then, after they subscribe, you should direct them to a ‘thank you’ page.  This allows you to track goals in Google Analytics to measure conversion rates and, in this example, it also allows you retarget only those people who actually subscribed.

Note:  On my thank you page I used to include a Facebook Like widget embedded within my page.  This allowed people to become a fan after they subscribed but, too often, the box didn’t appear.

With Perfect Audience you can now target email subscribers to become a fan.  You display ads directed only at them.  You can set up a time limit for how long you want to advertise to them, too.

Again you are buying fans!

3.  Drive people to a ‘Welcome’ page

A couple of years ago, you could force non-fans to see a ‘welcome page’ before they got to see your timeline.  This page was often used to convince people to become a fan.

You can’t do this any more, but you can still use a welcome page.

For example, if you are running advertisements to build your fans, then sending people to the timeline means you will end up with poor conversion rates.  You can still direct people directly to a welcome page and, on this page, you can strongly convince them to become a fan.

To create a welcome page, use an app such as Shortstack or Agorapulse which allow you to set up this custom landing page.

Here is an example of a landing page created with a strong incentive to become a fan.

 

Facebook landing page
Create a custom welcome page

Summary

Unfortunately, with Facebook, we’re in a world of pay to play.   On average, less than 5% of your fans see your content, so just sharing great content is not going to help you build a big Facebook fan base.

This means that you do have to buy likes if you want to grow quickly.

Buying likes from spammy sites that will give you hundreds of thousands of irrelevant fans for a low cost is actually a very high cost  measure, because it is damaging to your brand.  Very soon, you’ll be going through and removing invalid fans in the same way as you try to remove dodgy links from your website.  It will happen!

Investing your money in the right type of fans makes sense and is actually essential.  Be smart about how you are targeting people and, wherever possible, try to encourage your audience to share out your content.  You kickstart more awareness and sharing with money, but then you hopefully get some additional fans for free through the sharing your existing fans do, e.g. using Antavo or similar.

That’s it, that’s all I have to say!!

I would love to hear your opinion.  Do you agree with what I say?  Do you have anything to add?

How are you going to buy Facebook likes?

Ian

 

Growth image by Shutterstock

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