How Can I Grow My Facebook Fan Page Likes?

How can I grow my Facebook Fan page likes is still a popular question from retailers.

Countless businesses struggle with Facebook – big brands and small so I thought I’d share what works for me and my page.

First off, why are you looking to get more likes? You only want more likes so customers can engage with you. That means they talk to you. And you talk to them.

Consider Facebook as a way to increase the marketing of your retail store.

And it's not like some brochure or flier ...

Oh wait, are you already over Facebook? Consider these three recent stats from Zephoria:

• Worldwide, there are over 2.9 billion active Facebook users. This is a 7% increase year over year. Retailers, no matter your size, Facebook is too big to ignore.
• 1.9 billion people log into Facebook daily, which means a huge and growing number of Facebook users are active and consistent in their visits to the site, making them a promising audience for retailers.

The Facebook community is still growing and is an essential vehicle for retailers. The more likes and fans you have, the more likely they will expose their friends to you.

To grow your page likes, you must look at Facebook as if you are the DJ at your own club. You choose the music to get them to get up and dance with you.

The primary goal of a retailer's Facebook page is to have a great dance party. That means you have to constantly think about what will get them to dance with you.

And as you see them joining in, you need to respond in a way that keeps them around.

Contrast that to retail businesses with low followers...

They are often sharing posts that say how great they are. Hey, look at what we got! Hey, look at another saying I like! Or cat videos I like or cute dog pictures or.. Hey, I want to make sure you read this, so I’ll use ALL CAPS and lots of !!!!!!

OK, for the record – using ALL CAPS is the equivalent to shouting. I’m fairly sure multiple exclamation points are the same. No one wants to be shouted at – in a retail store, at a dance or on an iPad. Just don’t do that.

To grow your Facebook likes you need to constantly think up ways to talk to your followers the way they want to be talked to – finding the right music for them – not you.

You know if you get it right because your likes go up, and so do their comments. That usually happens because you are posting as a human being, with your personality coming through.

If you have low followers or low engagement rates, change your music.

An occasional update about an award you received or photo of yourself is fine but the kinds of posts you want to use should engage your tribe of followers well enough to make them want to share.

Here are Five Ways To Grow Your Facebook Fans

1. Stake out an opinion, then ask your followers’ opinion. It shouldn’t be something as controversial as I do on my pages but an apparel store could ask, Have you tried the dry cleaning substitutes for the clothes you usually took to the cleaners? I did and was disappointed.

2. Ask for their top tips to deal with something you sell. I did this with a gardening retailer and asked, “What would you tell a novice gardener to do to prepare for winter?” The business received almost 50 comments and an even greater number of new likes within hours.

3. Pictures win engagement over text - worth a thousand words has never been more relevant - the goal is to get your followers to want to share your content. That usually means a photo over a simple line of text. Choose wisely.

4. Offer tips and tricks because good content is often shared. Write down your wisdom about the types of issues your customers have to address and pare down the words. Or better yet use a video. I love the Lowe’s FixItInSix series of how-to-videos. They are engaging and sure to be shared.

5. Ask your followers to share your updates as I do with every post, “Appreciate your ‘likes,’ ‘shares’ and comments.” Those that don’t ask, don’t get.

And when you see in your Facebook page insights that a post got a lot of likes, remember you have to constantly look for ways to engage them again and again. Consistency is a big part of holding on to your fans.

In many ways, engaging your Facebook fans is not any different than having an engaging sales process in your store.

Either you are constantly looking at how to engage and talk with your shoppers so you can get them to enjoy and explore your space – or you are constantly looking at how to talk at customers without really knowing why they came to your store in the first place.

Would you run up to every shopper with a hanger and say, Look what we just got in? I hope not…you’d spend the time to build rapport – find the right music as it were to get them to relax and shop.

The same has to be true of your Facebook fan page.

In Sum

Every day you need to put on your thinking cap and think, “What can I post that will get my followers to engage with me?” You have to find the right music to attract them.

That’s the secret to having a winning presence on Facebook and a winning strategy in your brick-and-mortar retail store.