How To Get More Likes On Your Facebook Page From Real People

So you have created a fanpage and want to get more fans? More likes means more leads and more profit! 

So if you want real people to "like" your page, you have to give them "likeable" posts. Some tips on posting likeable stuff on your page.

Formulas for Posts - To Get More Likes

There are two or three main goals for each post, and if you want, you can try all three at once!

• To get likes, say “Click like if…” and keep the second part simple.
• To get comments, ask a question or say, “Tell me in the comments below…” followed by whatever you want to know.
• To get clicks to your website or blog post, put the URL in the update and say, “Click this link…” and tell them why.

Here are some more details on each.

“Click Like If…”

This is a really simple formula. It’s all about whether people agree with you. Choose something that you’re pretty sure 60 percent to 100 percent of your fans like. If you got a lot of fans from targeting a particular interest, you can be pretty sure they’ll respond positively to that. Tell them to click like if they like that thing. No brainer, right?

After you have the thing you want to show them or mention to them, combine it with the following variations of the formula:

• Post a photo or video related to the dream or benefits you’re selling, and make it something like “Click like if you’d love (to have this benefit)” or “Click like if you’d love to see yourself (living such and such dream).”
• “Click like if you love…” (ponies, bacon, or whatever applies to your niche).
• “Click like if you think….”
• “Click like if you’d love to have….”
• “Click like if you believe that….”
• “Click like if you want….”

Questions and prompts

The best questions are open-ended, which means they get fill-in-the-blank, not yes-or-no, answers. Imagine you’re on a first date and the goal is to get the other person talking. The more you listen, the more likely you are to get what you want. The more you talk, the more the other person turns off and you don’t get what you want.

Here are some ways to ask questions:

• “What do you think about…?” (For example, you could ask about some recent good news in the niche you’re operating in. Try to avoid asking about bad news unless you’re asking for people’s ideas for solving problems.)
• “How do you feel about…?”
• You can actually tell people to fill in the blank if you want. For example: “My ideal work day includes ______________. Fill in the blank and tell us!”
• “What happens when you…?”
• “What are your goals related to…?”
• “If you could change one thing about…, what would it be?”
• “What’s your favorite thing about…?”
• “When do you feel most…?”
• “Why do you…?”
• “What’s your favorite way to…?”
• “When you were younger…

Now how do you get your fans to visit website and there by increase your web traffic resulting in leads and sales? It is very simple too. 

“Click this link…”

If you put a web address into a post, Facebook automatically pulls in the photo, page title, and description. Most people assume the page title and description are written in stone, but you can actually change them. Click on the title and rewrite it, and click on the description and rewrite that.

That’s a lifesaver if, for some reason, it’s pulling in weird HTML formatting. And make sure you choose the thumbnail that looks more interesting or fits best with what you’re sending them to. If none of the images fit, select “no thumbnail.”

Don’t assume that the information Facebook grabs with your URL is stimulating enough by itself. Add calls to action like these:

• “Check out this blog post because…”; then tell them what the benefits of reading it are.
• “Click here to get this discount now before it goes away!”
• “Check out our latest press release”; then make sure they know why they should care. Press releases are often “me me me” selfish information about the company that no customer cares about.

If your blog post already has a catchy, stimulating title, you might not need to get too creative with the text you add in the Facebook page post. But make sure you add a reason to click and/or a question for commenting. If you don’t, that’s a missed opportunity. Remember, although you want people to click to the website, you still need the Facebook post to be visible to as many fans as possible. EdgeRank might count clicks to other websites, but we don’t know that for sure.

Good Versus Bad Posts

The following are qualities of successful posts:

• Has one percent feedback rate or more;
• Has 50 percent or more impressions compared to fans;
• Is attention-grabbing;
• Is something 95 percent of the audience cares about;
• Asks for a like or asks a question;
• Fits the demographics and geographic location of your fan base;
• Contains no-brainer text;
• Sells the dream;
• Is based on what you learned from ad testing.

Bad posts have these qualities:

• Feedback that’s below .5 percent;
• Impressions that are less than 30 percent of fan base;
• Not understanding audience;
• Posts that 95 percent of the audience doesn’t care about;
• Promotes things that very few people will care about;
• Photos without captions or calls to action.

Learning from Your Previous Posts

Administrators of pages can view some pretty cool insights, and one of them lists your last 10 posts, how many impressions it got, and the feedback rate you got from them. You can use this (and of course you can also scroll through your page’s wall and look at more of these) to look for patterns in which posts got better feedback rates and why. Pick out a few of the ones with the highest and a few with the lowest feedback rates, and see if you can tell what you did right or wrong. After you develop a theory about which posts are best for your audience, test it by trying another post along those lines to see whether you get similar results.

Engagement Milestones

Here are three milestones that will tell you you’re making great progress with getting your audience to interact with you:

• Getting one percent feedback regularly – If you’re using the formulas from this chapter, this is easy to achieve.
• People posting spontaneously on your page – When people are really excited about your brand or page, they’ll go back to the actual fan page and post there.
• Fans seeing and posting on fan page posts – If you have a lot of fans going back to your fan page and it’s set by default to show fan posts, too, then some of them might comment on each others’ posts. This is one way to know you’ve really got your fans stirred up. When they have that much enthusiasm, they’ll tolerate more sales messages.

Balancing Engagement and Selling Types of Posts

Some readers of this book might only care about creating interaction and remaining visible to fans, but others want a direct profit from their Facebook efforts. So, how do you combine conversation with sales? Do they fit together? Yes, a number of companies have found that they can alternate interaction-oriented Facebook posts with more direct offers, discounts, and other types of sales-oriented posts. You can see examples of these two types of posts in Table 11.2.

Engagement Versus Sales Post Formulas

Engagement Formulas	Sales Formulas
Click like if…	When are you going to…?
Ask a question	Are you ready to…?
Share this	Check out our…
Photo post	Discount
Guess what/where this is	Contest

So how do you meld together these two Facebook posting approaches?

Ideas for Posting - For Sales, Leads and Traffic

Some businesses with fans see good sales right away. Others have to work at it, especially those with longer sales cycles.

How often do regular customers buy from you? If they buy every three months, then expect new fans to take three months until they’re ready to buy. Your goal in that three months is to build awareness and a relationship so that, come decision time, that relationship and their knowledge of your offerings will be a strong influence to purchase.

Some of your fans might never have bought what you offer online. So, follow these suggestions:

• Post why it’s good to buy online.
• Post why you’re better than other online stores.
• Find previous customers with positive feedback whom you can quote.

Put a link to your website in more of your posts. If you get more likes and comments, you’ll get more impressions. Let’s say you’re getting 15,000 to 20,000 per post. You should be able to get one to two percent of those to click to the site if there’s a link. That means you could get perhaps 200 site visitors per day and 1,400 per week. So create posts that give a reason for people to like, comment, and click. Here’s an example:

• “Click over and check out this product: [link]. Do you LIKE it? What would you do if you owned it?”

Here are some posts that get people thinking and talking about products:

• “What’s the most important product for…?”
• “What ________ products do you like or dislike?”
• “Do you have trouble finding products for…?”
• “Do you buy _______ online?”
• “Are you ready to…?”

Another clever way to bring business into the picture without being so in-your-face that you turn people off is to talk about what’s going on in your business. Not all companies are willing to be this transparent, but it can be a big advantage.