You can grow your audience on Facebook in two ways;

audience

Organically

This means you invite people to ‘Like’ your page, you put out good content and lots of images and you try to engage your visitors. You add your Facebook page link to your email signature, add a social plugin to your website with the ‘Like’ button and to all forms of marketing materials.  You hope that those visitors will share your content and then other  people may come back and ‘Like’ your page if they found the content valuable.  This method simply takes time.

 

traffic-morgue fileSend traffic

The easiest way to send traffic to your Facebook page is to advertise.  This is a much faster solution than the organically grown method I mentioned above.  Also if you target your ideal audience correctly than you are attracting fans that actually are qualified or simply put…care about what you are offering. 

Tips for where to begin advertising

Tip one – A great place to start a targeting strategy is to target ‘friends of fans’, that is using social proof to say “your friend already ‘Likes’ this page, maybe you’d like to do it too!

Tip two –   target fans of your competitors.  If these fans already like the niche you are in than they may just ‘Like’ your page as well.

Tip three – create a page post ad targeted to friends of fans

[Take a few seconds and hop over to the GIR Facebook page – wouldja ‘Like’ it and receive marketing tips for small business owners
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Tip four – Create a Facebook offer. When you do create an offer always send people to an email sign up page (or opt-in page) so you can add their name & email to your email list before they get access to your special offer.  Many big companies have been using offers such as Target & Macy’s. But you can create great offer too, such as 50% off a product or service.

Use the Power Editor

When you are in the ads manager, be sure to download the free ‘Power Editor‘ into your ads manager.  It gives you more specific targeting options so you can really hone in on the demographics of your ideal audience.  Power Editor was designed to improve advertisers’ efficiency in creating, editing and managing a large number of campaigns and ads. For example, Power Editor allows operations like mass-editing of campaign settings, targeting, bids, budgets, flight dates, and creative elements across ads, campaigns, and even accounts. It also offers additional features such as placements and custom audiences. With Power Editor, you can also monitor ads stats in order to optimize ads and campaigns from within the tool itself.

Facebook instructs you to download Power Editor using the Chrome browser, but many including myself are finding that it also works well using the Safari Browser.

Create a budget

Set a budget for your ads and start small and test your results.  You’ll be amazing how many new fans you can reach with $50 if you target your audience using the tips mentioned above.  But with any form of advertising I recommend you test, test, and test some more.  Use a eye catching image in your ads and switch your images and text to see what your target audience responds to and then keep doing what works!

Have you had success with Facebook ads?  I’d love to hear your experience by commenting below!