There's not a lot that Facebook offers brands for free any more but here's a little known technique that might just net you a few new fans without having to shell out any advertising spend.
Most reasonably popular posts on a brand's Facebook Page end up surfacing occasionally on the newsfeed of non fans - normally in the form of a notification that a friend has liked or commented on the post. With a really popular post you'll often find a domino effect whereby you pick up Likes to the post from the non fan too. What a fantastic opportunity to convert to fandom. But how to do it?
It's actually pretty simple. Take the post below. Now we have just over 10,500 fans on the Musicademy Facebook Page but I'd picked up on a news story that I knew would appeal big time to our audience and sure enough, within a few days of posting the video piece we'd reached 43,500 people. Yep that's ORGANIC REACH of 412%. Eat your heart out Facebook Page Admins. I share some background on all that towards the end of this post.
So the first thing you want to do is see where all those Likes came from. Simply hit the hypertext link on the number of Likes as shown below by the big red arrow:
Facebook will then show you something like this:
You'll see people who already Like your Page (Jane Featherstone above), other brand Pages that Liked the post (the Leger des Heils Spikenisse Page shown above). You'll see people who have their privacy settings set really high (Sherena Sista Shez Lawrence) and a bunch of people who Liked the Post but aren't currently a fan (Helen Cockeram). Facebook lets you now invite those people to Like your Page in a message that it will surface in their newsfeed. Simply hit "Invite" and Facebook does the rest. For free.
You can even go back and do this through previous posts although I'd suggest doing it regularly to very recent posts while your brand has a chance of being in the mind of the potential fan.
There were a few factors going on here. I'll summarise the key ones.
I'm constantly fascinated by the ever-changing Facebook algorithm. At the time of writing this article the stats on the Facebook post were as follows:
You can't tell what your viral reach is without downloading your Insights data as a csv file and doing some calculations. I share how to do this every time I do any live training as I think it's an essential metric for Page owners to be aware of.
Video data. Facebook now allows you to download the metrics on video viewing (go to Insights and Export or simply hit the Post info on the dashboard). Here are the key stats for this post:
There are loads of tips like these that the majority of Facebook Admins are simply unaware of. Marie covers many of them in her “Deep Dive” days on Facebook Marketing and the other social networks. Along with colleagues from her consultancy, The Digiterati, she is running a number of these throughout 2016 both live in London and Manchester and also as extended webinars. She would love for you to join her! Click to register to receive updates (and coupon codes) as dates are announced.
By Marie Page
Marie Page @marie_page is one of the UK’s leading Facebook marketing experts. She is a founding partner of digital marketing consultancy The Digiterati and the Digiterati Academy, an e-learning portal for marketers and entrepreneurs. She recently published a book and online course “Winning at Facebook Marketing with Zero Budget”.
Turbocharge your results with this toolkit containing 12 resources
The Social Media Marketing toolkit contains:
Start your Digital Marketing Plan today with our Free membership.
Recommended Blog Posts
Our compilation of the latest social media statistics of consumer adoption and usage of social networking platforms Social networks have transformed marketing and, as this post shows, their popularity is still growing in our latest global social media statistics research …..
To make sure your social media campaign is as successful as possible, follow our 7 steps to plan and structure your campaign strategy If you have an upcoming marketing campaign for a new product feature, or a holiday promotion that …..
What do marketers need to know and do? Exciting times for marketers who enjoy following how digital platforms evolve… It feels like 2008, as I said in my first post on Threads… Since I’ll be talking about it, amongst other …..
