Part eight of our Behind the Scenes series examines how we recommend recruiting Facebook fans.
As a relative newbie to Facebook (I've only been on a few months longer than when I started my business), I'm still working on learning all of the ins and outs. One thing that has been difficult is figuring out how exactly to attract Facebook fans.
I figured out how to set up the page without much help, but attracting fans has been a whole different matter.
I started with the simple stuff - sending a message to all my friends and family on Facebook asking them to become fans. Apparently, most people decided they would rather not. ;) From my over 100 friend/family I got maybe 30-40 or so fans. Maybe they considered it spam. Maybe they didn't understand that it's free to become a fan. Who knows? All I know is, it didn't get me very far.
From there, I tried some Facebook advertising. It was expensive. VERY expensive. Plus, it was hard to figure out the whole pay per click or pay per impression thing. It took forever to figure out that impressions were more successful for me. Regardless, I didn't get too many more fans for all the money I pumped into it - maybe another 10 or 20.
After that, I gave up on Facebook advertising and moved to starting a thread on Etsy along with making a few small ad boxes for an advertising site that I love, Project Wonderful. That helped a lot more than my previous methods - you gotta love how community-oriented everyone is on Etsy! I swear most people I have met through Etsy are the nicest people you will ever meet. Not all of us are successful on Etsy - I myself have a harder time selling through Etsy than my own website - but it is a great community to be a part of. :)
The Etsy thread and Project ad helped quite a bit, but it was still a very very slow trickle of fans. I finally hit 100 fans after several months of having a Facebook page!
But then, through an Etsy chat, I was introduced to the idea of "Link Love", and that has opened up a wonderful stream of new fans!
The whole premise of link love is this: You post a discussion thread called "Link Love" or something similar, then post all your links and leave instructions for your fans to leave their links. You also let them know that they should start their own "link love" thread and make sure to fan/follow/etc. everyone else's links.
The only drawback I've run into is that Facebook gets all "you might be spamming people" on you if you do too many fanning/thread postings in one day. Kinda stupid, but I guess they need to make sure I'm not just some computer randomly spamming people. :)
So far I've gained over 30 fans in just a few days!! I highly recommend trying this method and then letting your current fans know about it, etc. It has worked for me! I hope to hit 250 fans by the end of February, and 500 by the end of April if I'm lucky. In the meantime, I still do things here and there on Etsy and through Project Wonderful. I also love to do prize drawings for my fans so they stay fans! :)
Jess Buike is the owner of Java Jess Publishing. To find out more about her business, check out her store here.
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