Michael Simonetti recently spoke with Nina Hendy from Smart Company on how to build Facebook likes. Here are the rest of his top tips.
Facebook likes is all about building a strong channel of active, and engaged users who will ultimately buy your products. Quality of the likes that you gain is the most essential factor. Lame strategies such as ‘like for the sake of liking us’ and purchasing 20,000 offshore account likes can cause irreparable damage to your social presence.
Instead of running for Facebook likes, run for customers who share affinity with your product and have a good reason to love your page. Encouraging on-brand or company essence FB campaigns that bear your products character provides people with good and productive reasons to like your page. This will translate positively to your bottom line as well as increase the social reach, virality and user sentiment.
Working out flexible strategies with strong metrics to access their impacts is important. However, the flexibility of a brand’s character determines the flexibility of strategies to encourage likes. So, with these preliminaries said, here are some top tips that can boost your Facebook popularity and the virality of your product.
# 1. Build Compelling Facebook Apps:
Building your campaign right into your Facebook – like the www.facebook.com/metricon/ – gives you more control over the users’ interactions. Make your App interesting and fun; the more game orientated the better. For example, we built an App for Sunsense’s UV protection campaign so that customers can virtually put their face on the SunSense Bus and then update their profile.
For Metricon – we built a Family Feud Survey Scoreboard to instantly compare top answers from different Australian states. These human tie-ins mean it is emotive and relatable, which will translate to a greater percentage of Facebook likes.
# 2. Provide Strategically Humanised Content
By this, we mean your content should be strategically tailored, encompassing entertaining, informative, and thought-provoking elements. This will ensure your posts are shared. It’s best to have a content strategy for days, months and seasons.
Link off-site channels into Facebook and provide content is a mix of photos, videos, infographics and text. The old saying ‘A Picture tells a thousand words’ should be put into action on your Facebook page every day. Besides this, posting to individuals or asking for feedback is a great way to engage more customers and identify brand ambassadors.
Most importantly, be consistent. Frequency builds Fans and helps gain more Facebook likes.
# 3. Make it Simple and Elegant
People use Facebook to interact and ease off their daily worries. So make sure you remove any complicating barriers and make it simple and elegant to use. It seems obvious, but a lot of Facebook campaigns are overly complicated. You have to lead users on a very simple path and make it even easier for them to like things during this process.
Remember; Barriers equal bounce rate.
# 4. Come up with an inspiring tag line:
Tag line of your campaign should be inspirational and well connected with your products. Having a quality tagline also ensures that you get quality likes that will translate to positive return on investment in the long term. Metricon’s ‘love where you live’ tagline is perfect; It made it easy for us to build a human, approachable and positive brand experience on Facebook.
# 5 Roll out moderate offers
Small cash prizes are realistic, up to $1000 works amazingly. For just a few clicks or text, people are not risking a lot for a potentially great bonus. We built this for QVSkincare’s ‘Grand in the Hand’ competition and the engagement was off the chart.
There are also many good examples of frequent small offers, like small weekly discounts building considerable likes. Just be cautious not to just develop an ‘offer only’ strategy as once again you are trying to build a strong army of followers, not deal-junkies.
Of course it goes without saying, keep the giveaways on brand: Don’t give away scented candles if your business sells pizzas – give away pizzas!
# 6 Campaign Strategies should have Variety
If you are thinking of launching a Facebook campaign, along with the content you should include where possible: competitions, information, and personalisation. Ensuring that your strategy addresses the question of user quality and great on-brand content will improve the overall goal, Return on Investment (ROI). There is no point having a hundred thousand likes, if no one is buying your product.
Go for Facebook Sponsored Stories, when possible. Sponsored stories have outperformed Facebook Ads for our clients for more than a year. Expect $1 to $3 per like for your page, depending on the quality of your content.
Track your campaign achievements and improvise
Use the analytics tool for identifying reach, and the demographics, ages, sex, and geographical location of your fans. Facebook analytics across your page provides these services. There are also tons of great social media tools to measure user sentiment. I recommend CrowdBooster to help schedule posts in advance and help you work out optimum times for posting, other good ones are HootSuite and SocialBro.
In addition, for direct sales measurements and analysis your website must have Goal Conversions built into Google Analytics. This will highlight which areas of your Facebook ecosystem are converting into actual sales.
Facebook, like any other social media marketing, is a slow and gradual process that promises ROI only if you garner and retain your fans by actively engaging them. And for this long process, it is equally important that your Facebook marketing team is resourceful. And above all, creative. They need to understand what their possible customers like to see, read and share with friends.