This may be the bazillionth blog post written on the topic of how to get more Facebook likes. However, this isn’t going to be a post full of ambiguos advice like ‘make your page more engaging’ and ‘create a compelling landing page’!
This post is a collection of real methods for driving likes. You may already be aware of or even using some of these techniques already, but I’m hoping that everyone will be able to take away at least one of the tips presented here and apply it to their Facebook marketing campaigns.
1. Use Interactive Youtube Annotations to Drive Likes
After finding out about this absolute gem of a tactic, I realised that YouTube disabled the ability to link to external sites using annotations. However, you can now use linkedtube.com to add link overlays to your Youtube videos which can link out to external sites (e.g. your Facebook Page).
2. Encourage Likes in Your Employee’s E-mail Signatures
How many emails does your company send out a day? If you’ve got a large amount of employees, or employees who send out a lot of email then this is a huge opportunity to passively drive likes or social signals to your domain. I wouldn’t consider myself a major email user, and even I’ve sent over 1,700 emails in 2011!
3. Go where the people are, and take your camera with you!
Coming from a background in helping bands promote their music, this is one of few areas in Facebook marketing where bands tend to do so much better when compared to brands. When you take a photo of people and stick it on Facebook, people tag themselves, which is then displayed to their friends – use this opportunity to reach your audience’s audience.
If you’re not hosting events or if your brand doesn’t naturally lend itself to this sort of thing, attend some conferences or industry events with a digital camera and take some photos. If you let people know who you are and where the photos will end up, they’ll likely find your page, and they’ll then have to like it to gain access to tag themselves.
4. Work Towards a Cause
Getting likes is much easier when you associate the ‘like’ as being a step in the right direction for a movement or cause that the person liking your page agrees with.
This is part of the reason why many charities are so popular on Facebook, because people feel that by ‘liking’ the page, they are indirectly helping the charity achieve altruistic goals. However, many brands such as Corona have done a similar thing by setting the cause as ‘helping Corona to become the #1 liked light beer in America’, which is obviously something that fans of Corona feel passionately about.
5. Gate Off Something Your visitors Will Want
Another brilliant way to drive likes is to offer something valuable in return for a person’s like. Many companies have done this successfully by offering discount codes or freebies to fans.
6. Recruit From Facebook
Offering jobs and allowing people to apply via a Facebook Page can be an incredibly effective method of getting your page shared across social networks as it encourages your fans to share your page with any of their friends who are looking for jobs. It also encourages return visits to your page from people who are looking for jobs and encourages further engagement from people who want to know more about the positions.
7. Utilise the Power of Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads can be very effective at driving likes IF you either have a highly likeable brand that people won’t need much convincing to like once they’ve seen the ad pop up, or if your value proposition when they reach your landing page is relevant and of value to them.
8. Swoop in on Unengaging Pages
It’s amazing how there are still so many large brands who for one reason or another are not actively engaging with their customers on their Facebook Page. This is a massive opportunity to get likes. If there are pages in your niche where people are asking questions and not getting answers from the brand, be the one who provides the answers. By helping them out you will drive people to your brand’s page and appear more interested in your customers than the other brand.
AutoTrader are a great example of a page where they have a high frequency of comments on their wall, but it seems they very rarely respond to customers in this way. If you were in the automotive market, this might be an excellent place to build a few extra fans.
9. Drive Likes from the real world
Driving likes from the real world is the latest craze. Last weekend I went to a event that gave us wristbands with a chip in them that is connected to your Facebook account. When we scanned our wristbands at these ‘Facebook stands’ at the event it automatically uploaded updates and photos to our Facebook walls – it also automatically added us as fans to the event’s Facebook Page.
Diesel also did an excellent campaign, where they encouraged people in stores to scan a QR code next to their favourite pair of jeans to ‘like’ them.
10. Ask For Likes on Your Business Cards
Finally, another great ‘passive’ tactic for driving an extra few likes from the people who you interact with in person is to include a call-to-action to join your Facebook Page on your business cards.
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