Want to get over 100 followers for your new brand on Facebook? Use this completely white-hat strategy to get real, engaged and relevant followers quickly.
Forget about the number
The first step to gaining your first 100 followers is to forget about the number. I used the example of 100 above as it’s a realistic target to reach in a few days, but depending on your niche and how much you scale this approach this number could be 1000 or 10,000. The most important point of the title of this article isn’t the number, it’s words. Two words in fact; Genuine followers.
Followers is just a number, and if all you’re focussed on is seeing 10,000 followers on your Facebook page, and are willing to get there at any cost, then that’s fine. The only reward you’ll get thinking like that is a nicely stroked ego. If you’re in this to build an online business out of a brand then you need people following your page who will be engaged with you.
This is nothing new in marketing. Targeted audiences are what makes money. If you sell gardening supplies would you rather promote to 1,000 people leaving a home and garden store, or mailshot 5,000 people picked at random from the phone book? Quality over quantity, or more accurately, relevance over follower count is what you should be focusing your efforts on.
This basic pillar of marketing is being forgotten in a world where you are dominated by strategies to get tens of thousands of followers in days with little or not effort. Yes, some of them work. They do what they say on the tin (sometimes), they deliver you followers. A nice big round number at the top of your social media profile that boosts your ego and makes you feel you are crushing it, until you realise the dark truth. Nobody cares about you or your product.
So with that in mind, what this article is going to show you is a way to start a Facebook page with zero followers and quickly ramp up your follower count with genuine, engaged people who will continue to provide value long after clicking that like button.
Create a Facebook page for your niche
Facebook is underrated by some people when they think about internet marketing. It’s still seen as the tool you use to share your family photos and stories about your kids growing up.
To start marketing a brand or business on Facebook you first need a Facebook page. This is different from an account. Your Facebook account is you, the individual, and this strategy will not work well with a personal profile page. Instead, from your Facebook account you can create a page. A Facebook page gives you the ability to have a presence on Facebook as a brand, not as a person. People are more likely to follow a brand they can relate with over a person they have never met. For this strategy to work you should be logged in as your personal user to create a page.
When setting up your Facebook page pay particular attention to two things. The name should instantly tell the viewer exactly what you are about. Don’t get clever and come up with creative anagrams or cryptic in-jokes as names for your page. Never use your own name either, this strategy will not work well. For example if you are using your Facebook page to drive traffic to a blog about vegan cooking tips, it should be really clear in your title that your page is all about that, a title like ‘The Vegan Cook” would be catchy enough, but also communicate the two important things you offer.
The second thing to pay attention to is the page profile logo. As with the title, try and communicate the type of content a user would likely get if they clicked your profile link. Make sure that your logo at least communicates some of your message when viewed at a smaller size on a Facebook post. Never use a photo of yourself.
Thy these two things are particularly important will become clear as we progress. Your title and logo are the first thing your potential new followers will see and are essential to get right if you want them to take action and follow your page.
Add relevant content to your page
Nobody wants to follow an empty Facebook page. While you might catch some passing likes with this strategy without content, you won’t hit the higher value followers that convert down the road. You need to spend some time creating content on your newly created page. At this point be very careful about the type of content you post to your page.
To begin with I would recommend not having anything that looks remotely like a sales pitch. If your page is about vegan cooking as per the last example then try and make the content something that people who are passionate about vegan cooking will engage with. Imagine what types of posts they would like from their friends and family and try and give them the same experience.
Continuing with the vegan example, people who are passionate about cooking tend to enjoy sharing experiences and photos. Add some photos of outstanding vegan dishes with descriptions that encourage participation.
The key at this point is not to post content that will convert into sales. You need to post content that will convert into likes. A sales converting post is written in a way to encourage a user to click onto a website or take some other action. What your posts need to do is simply touch that sweet spot where someone will enjoy your photos or videos and click like on the post. That’s it, keep it genuine and no hard selling or click baiting. Your posts should be provoking emotions, not encouraging actions.
You don’t need a ton of content to start, this strategy will work with as little as four or five posts. While more content will improve the results, getting the first couple of mouse scrolls or screen swipes to not hit the bottom of the page should be your first aim.
Join Facebook groups in your niche
Once you have your Facebook page set up and branded nicely with a suitable amount of relevant and reaction provoking content you can move on to the first part of finding new followers.
Facebook groups are massively undervalued by Internet marketers. That’s because it’s very hard to benefit out of a Facebook group when interacting as yourself without coming across a bit scammy. But did you know, pages can join Facebook groups as well as people? This is where Facebook groups can become pretty powerful tools when used correctly to quickly get high numbers of relevant interested followers.
The first thing you want to do is type in relevant subjects into the Facebook search box. Limit the results by clicking “Groups” on the left hand side and you should end up with a list of private and public groups full of people in your niche.
Pay particular attention to the number of group members and the number of posts per day. A low number of posts every day indicates the group isn’t particularly active and may be a waste of time. You should be targeting groups with membership numbers above 1,000, ideally north of 10,000. Once you identify some groups relevant to your niche, click through to the group page.
Pay attention to the group description and what is and not permitted in the group. You need to join groups where people like to share content similar to your own with each other and interact.
If the group looks active and relevant then it’s time to join. Note that there are two ways you can join a group, as yourself (the individual who’s account you are using) or as your branded page. Not all groups allow subscriptions from Facebook pages, it’s an option they can configure when they create the group. You can easily determine if a page can join a group by clicking on the join button. If the group permits page joins then you should see a pop-up asking you to confirm whether you want to join as yourself or as your page, you must select your page. If the pop-up doesn’t appear then you have automatically requested to join as yourself. This is irrelevant to our strategy, so in cases where you cannot join a group as a page, simply click “Cancel Join Request” and move onto the next group.
There is no set amount of groups you need to join, although I would recommend at least five. The more groups you join the more you will be able to scale this follower strategy.
Interact with the group
Facebook groups have many users all interested in your niche. They also have a couple of users who you don’t want to notice you too closely; admins. Group admins tend to be always weary of their groups being used to promote products or websites, or even to gain followers. This strategy is not spammy, nor are we doing anything that’s against the rules of the group, but we don’t want to just bomb our content into the group with seconds of being invited. You want to try and build a little trust in the group before we take things further.
I recommend spending 10 minutes or so liking a few posts and commenting on other peoples content. Remember, good followers are highly valuable but also highly fickle. The more trust you can build at this stage the better. Try and become a member of the group, not just a random post.
Once you’ve interacted a little with the group, left some comments and given out some likes, I would recommend letting the group sit for a day. Posting content right after being accepted may set alarm bells off for the admins of the group they may scrutinize your intentions.
Share content from your page to Facebook groups
Now it’s time to start the first phase of actually hooking in your page followers. Firstly have a good look at the other posts in the group. Try and get a sense for what types of posts have generated the most likes. The aim here is to find a post on your Facebook page that is similar in content and style to the most popular posts in the group, the ones with the high like counts. This strategy is all about the likes.
Once you have identified a post on your page that fits the style of popular posts within the group, then click the share button from your page and select “Share to group”. Here you can add some description text to make it seem less of a robotic share. Try and be personable, add a description that conveys to the reader that you genuinely want to share your content with their community. Don’t just blindly hit the share button, it looks too obvious.
It may take a little time for your first posts to be published in the group, that’s normal for a new subscriber. But if you have taken all the advice I’ve given you here then it should appear shortly in the group.
If your content is interesting enough, it may start to generate comments. Be as interactive as you can with comments, replying as much as possible. Remember the key to gaining good followers is trust. There are posts that I have used with this strategy that have performed twice as well because I replied to a comment and it started a conversation on the post.
We want to post a few shares to each group, but never more than one a day to each group. I would sometimes even recommend no more than two posts a week for groups that aren’t overly active. Once you’ve shared the content it’s time to sit back and hope that people like your posts, then we can reap the rewards.
Invite people who like your shares
This is where the magic happens. Many people are unaware of this particular feature when joining Facebook pages to groups. When a group member clicks like on any of your shared content, you can send them a one time invite to like your Facebook page. This invite will show right up in their notifications and the conversation rate here is impressively high, especially if you put the effort in on making your page appealing.
The great thing about this strategy is that it’s entirely white hat. That is to say, there’s nothing shady about this practice and we’re not doing anything that the platform will frown on. In fact, quite the oposite, you will notice in your notifications that when someone likes your post Facebook actively encourages you to invite them to like your page.
There are a couple of ways to actually invite people who have liked your posts. The first is to just monitor your notifications. The second is to go to the original post on your page where you should see the amount of shares the post has. Clicking on this link will show you each group share you made and the amount of likes that the post has generated in each group. By clicking on each of the ‘X Likes’ links you will see a pop-up showing you all of the people that liked the post, and to the right of that the golden button — Invite.
Wherever you see a user with an invite button, Facebook lets you invite the user once to like your page. Simply click the button (or the ‘Invite all’ button to do this in one step) and each user will get a notification inviting them to like your page.
When someone likes a page they automatically become a follower unless they opt out of following your page. And as we mentioned, the conversion rate of like invites is pretty high. So using this method you should quickly start to see relevant engaged followers on your Facebook page.
This strategy is best suited to new pages since you can only invite someone once to like your page. Not everyone in a group interacts with posts or clicks like. Some simply lurk and consume. This is why picking groups with a high membership and high daily post rate are the best, since you can maximize on likes. Eventually though, you will notice that the people that like your posts have already been invited, and you will notice the well of new invites start to dry up. But depending on your niche and the amount of relevant groups you can find to join, you can potentially reap thousands of new engaged followers using this method.
Conclusion
This strategy is great if you have a new Facebook page and want to get to that hurdle of 100 or 1,000 initial followers. More importantly though, this strategy delivers followers that not only have a keen interest in the exact content that you are publishing, but they’re also active users. As content creators the most valuable reader or follower is the type of person who interacts or takes action on the content we produce. So while this strategy doesn’t promise to deliver you tens of thousands, or even millions of followers, it does deliver you the creme-de-la-creme of high quality followers that you will rely on later to push your online brand forward.