How To Get Followers On Facebook

To get more followers on your Facebook page nowadays, when the channel floods with insights, is not an easy task. You need to have a to-do list of time-tested methods to boost the process. Facebook is a social media channel teeming with people and it can become the best online home for your business. It gives your business one major benefit – free online presence – and many opportunities to extend its influence beyond your existing connections.

The State of Facebook Today
Why You Need a Facebook Business Page
Invite Friends to Like Your Page
Create a Target Persona in Facebook Audience Insights
Find Followers on Facebook Groups
Post at the Right Time
Partner with an Influencer
Ask People to Tag Your Page
Use Automation Tools to Gain Followers on Facebook

The State of Facebook Today

Facebook encourages marketers to think of their Page as a "digital storefront" that allows real Facebook fans to discover your business. As of the first quarter of 2019, Facebook had 2.38 billion monthly active users , which makes it a network far too big to ignore.

Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 1st quarter 2019 (in millions).

In fact, Social Media Today reports that Facebook adds 500,000 new users every day and 6 new profiles are created every second. These numbers are quite convincing, imagine how effective a Facebook advertising campaign can be.

Why You Need a Facebook Business Page

I can't stop saying that Facebook has a lot to offer. The main benefits of creating a Facebook company page is that it's free and versatile. You can connect with customers, advertise, share information, use many free page tools and insights. It has analytics, where you can track the efficiency of what you do.

Additionally, current opinion-makers and influencers in online marketing believe that social is the new SEO . It's good to remember that Google crawls social websites for data just like it crawls any other website. This can lead us to the assumption that the pages we have on social can influence our website's ranking in the search engine. Therefore, a Facebook page not only personalizes your relationships with the audience. The more people share it, the better is Google's opinion of your brand's website. To gain more authority, it's essential to get more Facebook followers.

On the flip side, Neil Patel's recent investigation has shown that "you may only be able to generate only 2 visitors a month for every 100 followers you have, but that scales as you grow your social following on every network." What is the actual lesson we can learn from all this data? It seems there is no sense in leading your Facebook business page without expanding its reach to more followers.

Invite Friends to Like Your Page

Friends will likely become your first real followers on Facebook after you create a Facebook page for your business. You can kindly invite them to like and follow your page and Facebook will encourage you to do so. After you invite a certain number of people, their friends will see it in their feeds and visit your page as well. Make sure that you have a little bit of enticing content before the invitation takes place. You need to capture your potential follower's attention and the best way to do it is with thumb-stopping content.

PromoRepublic has a library of premade posts and can help you create great visual content in its Editor, so you won't have to spend too much time on your first steps. It will also allow you to schedule content for automatic posting, suggesting time slots that work best for specific types of content during the week. It's a good tool to explore before you start working to increase followers on Facebook.

ready content ideas and social media posts

To make your colleagues' friends express genuine interest in your page, post photos of your team and newcomers whenever they get the job. You can also do it through PromoRepublic.

Create a Target Persona in Facebook Audience Insights

To increase Facebook followers, g et to know the people who matter to your business and you will understand what matters to them. With Facebook Insights, you can learn about their locations, interests, and behaviors, so you can create messages that will help your business grow.

Follow this link to Facebook Insights and find Create Audience Section on the Left.

Start filling in the information about your target audience. Enter the country and regions where you believe your target audience lives. Just to give you a clue, the target audience of my business page that specializes in Publishing are English speakers interested in digital project management. So it comes as no surprise, I'll choose English-speaking locations, like the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Australia, and others. You can also mention the country, where your business has a physical address. To put it simply, if you sell products and offer services online, set all the locations which you want to target.

The next thing you'll need to pinpoint is age and gender. While I believe my target audience is both men and women, I'd focus on age, as people aged under 23 years old will unlikely express interest in the topic of project management. However, if you target men or women specifically, you can exclude this or that gender. Same with age – if you offer services for retired people, teenagers should be excluded.

Next, define several interests that are related to your business. If you are a real estate agency, search for property, if you're a fitness studio search for the gym, yoga, pilates, etc. There are other options in the menu that you can specify, such as job titles people have. They will make the results more effective.

Once you've fine-tuned your ideal followers, you can save the Audience Section, as you will be able to use it further for boosting your posts. Don't forget to click Save at the top of the page. This way, Facebook created your target persona. Now you can check the interests and activities of your audience. Go to Page Likes first to see what pages your target audience likes. Here are some results, based on the information I filled in:

I can see that 4.2 million people in my target audience like Front Cover, a Media and News Website, so I'll definitely explore to get some of the ideas from there, clicking on the link Facebook provides. A great part of my audience also likes IKEA and it gives me some proof that I should do an interview with IKEA's project managers to share their experience.

To make a long story short, Facebook Audience Insights let you tailor your content creation habits to your target audience taste and grow your following.

Find Followers on Facebook Groups

One free little trick that really makes you gain Facebook followers is to become a member of Facebook groups as a page. Then everything you post will appear under the name of your page and your logo. You'll be able to interact and discuss things as a page and, believe me, people will immediately visit your page once they see something new. In fact, you'll be able to invite anyone who engaged with your post:

how to invite people to like your page on Facebook

To get accepted into a group on Facebook and pass moderation, you'll need to fill in some information about yourself and follow its rules. But it's worth it. Imagine your discussion or post goes viral in the group and gets more likes than you expected. It will immediately reach thousands of people whom you'll be able to invite to follow your page.

Here're some of the best practices when Facebook groups come into play.

Choose to become a member of the group from your business page.

Post content you think best fits the group's interests.
Don't overspam – publish only relevant and good content.
Ask questions and participate in the discussions. A group full of people will definitely express interest in your business page.

Post at the Right Time

Posting at the right time is an effective way of getting more likes and shares on Facebook and expanding the reach of your page to new horizons of followers.

In April 2019, Zephoria collected information and updated a study saying that a spike in Facebook users' activity falls on Thursdays and Fridays. The overall engagement rate tends to be 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays , compared to other weekdays. Also, learn when to post on Facebook based on your specific niche:

Check our complete guide to peak Facebook posting times .

Partner with an Influencer

You don't need to find Facebook followers manually and spend most of your time asking people to follow you. If you have a business page, partnering with an influencer in your field is a no-brainer. But don't be misled by a huge number of followers influencers have, rather find someone whom people trust the most. Check the activity under the influencers' posts to determine if their followers are real and if there's trust.

There are three types of influencers, according to Social Media Today:

Mega-influencers are famous people that have millions of followers.
Macro-influencers have between 100K and 1 million followers.
Micro-influencers have fewer than 100K followers.

You don't necessarily need to partner with a mega-influencer, even micro-influencers who have fewer than 20K followers may have great engagement rates. To find an influencer, you can do a manual search or use tools like Social Bond or LeadFuze.

Ask People to Tag Your Page

Getting Facebook page followers doesn't stop with all of the steps above. In addition to them, you can ask people to @tag your page whenever someone shares your post.

To be efficient, this method should go together with a call-to-action for people to follow your page, though. Otherwise, it just brings more traffic to your website. Here's a kind of a private message you can use to ask people to tag your page:

Hi! It's Irene. I'm a big fan of what you do on social and the fact that you shared my post really flatters me. Could you please @tag my page as I'm trying to grow my following? Keep up the good work and let's get in touch in the future.

To get the attention of influencers, you may want to tag them in your post. Just put @ mark (without space), start printing the name in the text box until Facebook makes suggestions, and then choose the appropriate name. If the name you're referring to gets bold, you've done it right.

If you're in the Facebook boat, you'll need to keep your posting schedule consistent. But it's difficult to outperform competitors in terms of post ideas and visual content especially if you're a young business or freelancer. To kill two birds with one stone – post frequently and post great things, sign up to PromoRepublic. This smart social media tool has many things a marketer needs to build a presence on social. Let's face it – brands have to live up to their audience expectations.

Which steps have you already taken to increase Facebook followers? Did they work? Share your experience in the comments below!