“How do I grow a Facebook page”

If you’re like most businesses out there, you created a Facebook page and invited all your friends and family to like it. But now you’ve exhausted those resources and it’s time to figure out a new strategy to build the page. 

Along with how to grow a Facebook page, similar questions are asked on how to grow a Facebook Group.

Now, there are a few organic methods you can use to build your page or group, including:

• Sharing it on your personal profile page
• Sharing it in groups when they have a promo day
• Sharing it in your emails or on your page itself
• Sharing it in your other social media bios and pages

We all know that organic is tough work, regardless if you’re trying to grow a page or a group. Sometimes it’s worth investing a tiny bit of ad spend into engagement ads in order to build up your page with new followers. 

When Facebook ads first started years ago, the only ads available were called boosted posts. These were simply putting some money behind a post on your page to help “boost” engagement on it. Nowadays you can run a multitude of different types of ads to help grow your business and revenue, including running engagement posts similar to boosts, but with more targeting abilities than just page followers. (To learn more about the difference between Ads and Boosts, visit this blog post.) 

Putting some ad spend behind a post on your page was and still is a great way to help build your brand awareness and get more visitors, especially when you are running low on organic methods. 

The two most common types of engagement ads to help grow your Facebook page are, Page Likes and Page Engagement campaigns. My favorite of the two is page engagement ads because if someone’s actually engaging on the post, they’re going to be more likely to engage with your content; whereas with a page like campaign, you can end up with people that just like the page but they aren’t likely to engage with any more of your content. This can actually hurt your page if you have a large following with no real engagement taking place. 

I do recommend testing both methods and see which one works best for you. 

Engagement ads are designed to encourage comments, likes or shares of that particular post. But in order to not be smarmy about asking, or to possibly break Facebook’s terms of service, you don’t really want to say on the post/ad that people should like, comment or share it. (In fact, on specific posts such as contests, you absolutely cannot make those requirements of entering)

Get a bit creative on how you ask for engagement without actually saying “like, comment or share”

Once you start building up those engagements, you have the ability to then invite them to like the page. This doesn’t mean all engaged people will accept the invitation to like the page, but it can bring in more new followers easily for you. Engagement on a post actually helps increase the reach and exposure of it to new people on an organic level. If you look at the images below, this was an engagement ad I had done with a client. You can see we put a little bit of money behind it as an ad and let it run. As the paid traffic hit the post, the organic traffic also grew, giving us more exposure for no extra money. 

How to grow your Facebook Group

In order to grow your Facebook group with paid traffic, you have to do it in a different kind of manner.

Facebook does not allow you to run ads to a group as it goes against the terms of services. The only way you can run ads to a group is actually creating a bridge page. A bridge page is essentially a landing page that has information about your group, why people would want to join it and then a link or button that takes them to your group. The problem with running ads to a bridge page is that it takes an extra step for people to complete, click on the link in the ad, and then click on the button on your landing page. (Plus then click the button to actually join your group.)

Another option is utilizing your Facebook page to direct people to your group. Here are a few of the organic ways you can help use your page to build your group.

• Use your Page banner to showcase your group with arrows pointing to your button.
• Use your button link to direct people to join your group
• Use the pinned post and create a post or video that discusses the benefits of joining your group
• Use a weekly post to talk about your group and direct followers to join
• Other organic methods are similar to how you grow your Facebook page, as listed at the top of this article.

In essence you would use your Facebook page as the bridge to your group. Build the page followers up and then organically redirect them to join your group instead of running ads to a bridge page.

If you do decide to run ads to your page, whether it’s for page likes or engagement you want to keep an eye on your targeting options because you don’t want to target people who aren’t in your audience, no matter how cheap the page likes can be. You’ll want to make sure you’re targeting specifically for people who are going to be interested in your business and what you offer. Your Facebook page should be filled with people who you can engage with and nurture them along their customer journey. If you run cheap page like ads to third world countries just to build up a vanity metric, you will severely impact the health of your business page. Don’t allow yourself to fall for this tactic. Reach and Engagement will always be the better metric of a good page over followers any day.

You do not need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to engaging content. There are many tried and true posts that spark real engagement and conversations to help you build a page following that is active. Grab my FREE swipe files on some of the best viral conversation starters out there to help grow your page and group following.

P.S
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P.P.S
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P.P.P.S
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