Why Your Facebook Page Isn’t Growing -And How To Fix It
Do you run a Facebook page? If so, is the page growing by 50-150 new “likes” a day and is there constant interaction on your page? If so, great; you are probably doing something right. If not, my guess is that you’re focusing too much on one third of the puzzle.
All effective Facebook pages have 3 pieces of content. Too often, page owners focus on one and ignore the other two. The most effective pages use all 3 in a systemized and strategic fashion.
The result is both a growing page, leads in your marketing funnel, and more sales. If you’re interested in making more sales, read on. If not, well, this probably isn’t for you.
1. Viral Content
Viral content is meant to go out and find a new audience. It does this by appealing to the desires of your existing audience to show off or add value to others. As a result, they will want to share your viral content with their networks and expose your page to new people. Viral content can be composed two different ways:
1. A meme related to your niche. It’s quite easy really. Take a couple of hours and do a Bing search (Bing’s image search is much better than Google) for *ENTER YOUR INDUSTRY NAME HERE funny*. Create a cache of photos you find to post at a later date on your account.
2. Repeat the spoken and unspoken desires and truths of your audience. This is usually done with a text-based update. Identify the controversial subjects that affect your audience and write a one-sided status update that reiterates the viewpoint that most of your audience agrees with.
One thing I do want to mention is that you probably won’t sell that much product from your Facebook page even if you can figure out a way to get people to share your sales letter or affiliate link. The below picture is a good example.
88 people shared my affiliate link… and not a single sale. Back to the drawing board.
2. Value-add
Perhaps the biggest mistake most page owners make is that they focus too strongly on value-ad material and not enough on the other two types. Value-add material isn’t all that important unless you have an audience to add value to. What’s important is to recognize what type of content will spread and what won’t. Once you have an audience, it’s important to include value-add material to keep your readers coming back. When you’re trying to find a new audience, stick to viral posts.
A value-add post is usually text-based but can also be paired with a picture if you like. Effectively, it’s a mini blog post. It can vary but I usually stick to 200-500 words but am not all that deliberate. I keep it succinct, but use as many words as I need to say what I want to say.
3. The Call to Action
Want to know the biggest downfall of most Facebook pages?
It’s that they look at the Facebook page as the end goal. The ONLY reason that you have a Facebook page is to gather an audience, build a relationship with that audience, and get that audience off of Facebook and onto an email list as fast as possible.
Always remember that the number of fans on your page doesn’t matter. How many sales you make matters. And you don’t make sales through Facebook — people just don’t buy stuff when their perusing their feed. They do however opt-in to marketing funnels.
Include calls to action on every post you make. These might include asking people to comment, click a link, or go to a squeeze page and enter their email.
Facebook is the most powerful marketing medium in the world, but nobody buys stuff off of it. Recognize that the power in the medium lies in the ease of building an audience and learn how to use all of the tools at your disposal to do so.
Jonathan Goodman is the founder of Viralnomics http://georgettepann.com/viralpt
He is an author, Internet marketer, consultant, and entrepreneur. He also started and continues to own and operate the world’s biggest collaborative blog for personal trainers, thePTDC.
