Why You Need to Make a Facebook Fan Page
Facebook is the second most popular site on the web, according to Alexa. With over 350 million members, you would think a lot of companies and individuals would be creating fan pages, but they aren’t.
About a month ago I decided to create a Facebook fan page, so I enlisted Jeff Widman to help me.
Once I had it completed, I thought I would have hundreds of fans instantly because I have over 2,000 friends on Facebook. Sadly, this didn’t turn out to be the case. If you want to get friends over to your fan page, you have to do a lot of manual work such as inviting all your friends to join.
The harsh reality
I invited people to become fans of “Quick Sprout”, but less than 5% of my friends joined. My guess is that they receive too many fan requests, so they ignore them like I do, or they didn’t know Quick Sprout was my blog.
After making a few tweaks, I have decided to change my Quick Sprout fan page to a Neil Patel fan page. Through this new fan page, I would still be able to promote my blog as well as my other companies.
Within hours, my Facebook friends were getting emails like the one below.
Because the message was so entertaining, roughly 36% of my friends became fans. In addition, many of these fans were so amused with the message Facebook created that they even sent me an email.
The first big lesson I learned with fan pages is that if you want people to join your page, you either need to offer something or do something silly to get people’s attention and have them join.
Communication is your key to success
At this point, I had hundreds of fans, but my Facebook fan page wasn’t doing anything for me. Luckily enough, one of my fans called me out for not interacting with my fans.
Once I recognized the importance of interacting with my fans, I started following up with every fan who posted on my wall. In addition, I integrated my blog’s RSS feed into my Facebook fan page.
I also started posting just to create conversations. For example, I asked my fans what they were doing for Thanksgiving, which led to 14 new comments and 15 fans “liking” the question.
After I got the ball rolling, I noticed that Facebook started to drive a decent number of visitors to my blog.
Over a 3-day period, I received 356 visitors from Facebook, whose visits to my blog averaged 2 minutes and 43 seconds. This wasn’t too shabby, considering 8,000 visitors from Google spent 1 minute and 16 seconds on my blog.
The real value in having a fan page
Getting extra traffic to your business from a Facebook fan page is great, but it isn’t the best thing that a fan page provides.
The real value I get out of having a fan page is the stats that Facebook provides.
By analyzing the stats above, I learned that:
- Roughly 81% of my fans are males. If I want to attract more female fans, I have to write more content and blogs targeted to females.
- Supporting the above point, more females interact on my fan page than males do, so I should be targeting female fans.
- Most of my fans are between 18 to 44 years old, so I need to tailor my new content to that demographic and not worry about the others.
- To grow my blog faster, I should target 18 to 34-year-olds because they are more likely to interact with me and read my blog posts.
- I have a lot of fans from the US, but it seems a good portion of fans are also from India. I need to start embracing my culture so I can create a larger Indian following.
- I also noticed that simple questions have a better response rate and help build the community. When I posted complex questions on my fan page (I have deleted them now), very few people interacted with me, and I started to lose fans.
1000 fans and counting
After a month or so of having a fan page, I finally reached 1,000 fans. I learned that having a fan page can be very valuable. Not only does it help drive traffic to your business, but it can also give you a good understanding of who your customers are.
If you want to learn about your fans, friends, or even customers, I highly recommend you create a Facebook fan page. It will not only allow you to interact with people, but it will also help you get to know them on a personal level.
Next, I am going to try growing my fan page to 10,000 people. I have added a Facebook fan widget in the sidebar of my blog, and I am going to start buying Facebook ads.
P.S. If you’re looking for help to grow your social media channels click here.
| |
||||||||||||
If you want to break through to real profits online, you need some serious firepower. For a limited time I’m sharing some select tips and tricks Amazon, Microsoft, NBC & Hewlett Packard paid thousands of dollars per hour for, FREE.
|
||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
Comments
Kick ass tips! Never even thought about the benefit of really seeing the demographics of your audience or the email thing.
Would love to hear about your results buying Faceook Ads once you test it.
I don’t know when I will start buying ads, but I will let you know how it goes.
This is mention from Shoemoney.com also. Facebook Ads will help you growth business and brand yourself and make popular path.
It definitely will so it’s a great way for you to allow yourself to grow bigger, faster, and stronger as a website.
Yeah, I am agree that. Because Facebook is world no 2 website, it have got 3 billion registered users.
Actually it’s 300,000,000 users… still not too shabby
Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines are usually what comes to mind when one thinks of Pay-Per-Click ads. However, there is another huge market for PPC ads that is often overlooked by online businesses: Facebook. That’s right, Facebook ads are offered in the PPC format, allowing online businesses to take their targeted marketing to the next level.
They definitely have an interesting setup with how they do ppc. Imagine building you fan base by a per fan cost.
Sure buying facebook ads will promote your fanpage quite effectively but for people with a tight budget, it is probably smarter to get your exposure from a place like www.morelikes.net first.
Ads with facebook can be quite affordable! If you get ad with Facebook, I recommend setting your ads to “Pay Per Click” with Facebook. These can be some of the lowest cost per click ads out there. The cost per conversion seems to be good for a variety of clients I’ve set it up with. A facebook fan page is a great to get additional exposure, and an inexpensive way of getting traffic to your website.
From my experience, those ads haven’t been to successful. Even though they’re very targeted, they’re very often ignored.
You can gain more visitors in many ways. You just have to take advantage of everything that offers even the smallest chance.
There are several different opportunities available, you just have to be willing to make the effort in finding them and then focusing on building it.
Great article Neil – Thanks so much! It took me a few minutes to figure out where the link is to the stats, but I finally got it. You’ve also given me more inspiration to create dialogues with the page.
That’s great too hear. You’d be surprised at everything you’re able to track with fan pages.
Adding a facebook fanpage to my site was something I should have done from the start. Just 2 months in, I’ve got over 2200 fans, and it’s growing by an average of 25-35 new fans per day. Besides getting a feel of what the demographics on my site are, I really enjoy the community that is building up. People are interacting with each other, and suggesting the page to more friends.
Have a look at what I mean here: www.facebook.com/pages/Watch-Missed-Episodescom/133760354362
That’s great Bob… what are you doing to market the page? How are you leveraging it for your business?
The only thing I do at the moment is have the widget, which shows the fans, on the sidebar. The ‘social proof’ seems to trigger a snowball effect. And I am running a little contest, where people get entered into a draw for a DVD box set of their favourite TV show, simply by becoming a fan.
Obviously I’m getting a lot of return traffic from the fan-page, and the fans themselves slowly increase my sites presence on the web. It is a great tool to communicate with the visitors, asking them for suggestions to improve their site experience. It also acts like some sort of mailing list I guess. With a press of a button, I can send out a message to over 2200 people.
In the long run, I think that if the day ever comes that I’m selling my site, the attached value of a massive active and accessible fan-base will certainly increase the price.
That’s fantastic. Also, great job on the personalized contest… I agree, by having that much marketing power, you leverage you site to have much more value.
Hi Neil,
Great post. I do have one question. How were the Facebook email notifications generated and sent to your friends? Do you have an app for that? Let me know, thanks!
It’s just an email that’s sent out… go into your Facebook notification settings.
I am your fan after reading this