Firstly, It all depends on three factors :
- Target Audience
- Type of Business
- Target Geography
Target Audience : These are the type of audience which can eventually become your customer. Some products/services are so general that everybody uses those. I have something up my sleeves for such products/services too. Just be with me for sometime.
Type Of Business : This is very important factor because on facebook people tend to like some category of businesses without hesitating and some with some strong call to action. So if you have a business that is more buzzy in nature and people like to know everything about that industry. So it would be more easy to gain likes for your business.
Target Geography : It is also a very important factor. The more spread your business is the more places you can market. Basic fundamental for marketing. So it is the same in Facebook Marketing too.
So the method to gain facebook likes is of two types. As your not going to spend money on Ads, you need to spend time and effort on this.
First thing you need to do is to do a lot of research. You need to do some analysis before you step into real stuff.
Industry Analysis - What are the various categories in your industry. For example : An social media marketing industry would have different categories such as facebook marketing, twitter marketing etc.
Competitor Analysis - What are your competitors doing with their page. This is mainly because of the content they are posting. I will be coming to the content part at the end.
Facebook Group Analysis - This is were your first step begins, So you should know two things in this analysis. Firstly, know what are the active groups which are regularly posted and filled with engaged audience. Secondly, know what are the groups which are specific to your industry in your Target Region. Search terms should be reduced to cities as many people like to keep their group names with city name at the end.
After these analysis, you should have clear Idea about which groups are active with engaging audience in your Industry and in your target geography. For Example : If you have a target geography of Australia, Uk and your product is an Automobile product. You can search with the name car parts uk, car parts sydney and I bet you will find huge number of groups with active members.
Creating General Groups/Pages :
Now Create Group/Groups of your own with the keywords used in the most engaging or active groups.Do not create a Group with your Company name. Because people do not like to like Company pages which they do not know. The keywords should be general which people will type when they think to join a group which talks about your industry. Do not create same name groups, Either differentiate groups with names or same names but different target geography. Eg : car parts berlin, car parts Manchester etc.
:
Now Create Page/Pages of your own. These pages should be divided by geography and Industry category. For example : If yours is health industry. Make pages related to different categories such as
fitness, news about health, homemade tips to get healthy etc. People love to get general content rather that sale content.
Now you have General Groups and General Pages in hand. You need to do 2 things now
- Start posting general content in your general pages.
- Start calling people from other similar groups to your groups. You cannot post to like your page in those groups. Because facebook considers it as spam. But you can post as many times as you can for inviting groups members to your general groups. Do it on a regular basis, not on a hourly basis. People may get irritated with your invitation.
As the people increase in your groups. Keep a pinned post of your general page in those groups and ask them to join your page. But do not do it in the initial stages as people might not join your group if they see your asking them to like. You can do it once you reach a good amount of people. Engage with audience in your group and get them to like your general pages. Do not stop posting general and interesting content on your general pages. You should have a good content marketing strategy for general pages too. when you get good amount of likes for your general page. It is the time to when you post your brand page posts too with general content on your general pages. Even you can post sales content too. But do not do it more often. Keep general content 80% and your brand content 20% or it depends on your Industry.
In this strategy your target audience will flow in a funnel to like your page and even sales. From different groups people will like your general pages first. Then they will spread your general content to their friends which completely depends on the type of content you publish. Then there friends will like your general pages. And now you have a great number of people who are your target audience and even interested in your industry. Now you can show them your brand page and promotional content which drives them to your brand page and eventually result in sales.
Hope I have explained you everything. I would be making a case study soon on this with some examples which would explain you the concept in more detail. I would be mailing the presentation to my mailing list first before release. Do care to subscribe to my email list. Cheers!!
