Getting Facebook likes is easy, just pay a few bucks and watch them roll in. Getting organic Facebook likes is a lot harder. Pushing out a lot of share-able content helps, but what if you don’t have the time to create vast amounts of content? What if you don’t know what your audience will share?
I stumbled on to this Facebook likes trick a few months ago, and have spent significant time testing how it happened, and how to make it repeatable. Through a this testing I figured it out a fairly sound methodology, enjoy the results below.
Step One – Research
Research is by far the most time consuming part of this process, and can be mind numbingly boring. There are ways to speed this up, but they are against Facebooks “ToS” so make sure you know what you are doing before attempting anything like that.
Step one is all about finding the pages that are relevant to your page. you’re looking for the top pages here, those with a lot of existing fans that are related to your niche. When you have those pages, download and crosscheck the fan lists and find the groups that you found have the highest numbers of members in common. If you really want to get this right, do a cursory scrub of the members to get rid of fake profiles (You don’t want to align yourself with five groups which are all filled 90% with spambots).
Step Two – Align your Brand with Those Pages
Take three to five of the best pages, now you get to align them to your page.
Facebook’s algorithm for related pages seems to be surprisingly simple, and works mostly off two main variants.
The first is friend groups. Ten percent of your friends like this page – you should like it too. This is nearly impossible to get widespread and artificially without spamming ludicrous amounts, so I don’t recommend this. Ideally paid ads and the method below will naturally generate this for you.
The second method is far easier, and from the testing results, more effective. By using multiple accounts or paying people on fiverr, you can get people to like the three to five best pages you picked, and your own page. This sends a signal to Facebook that people who like those pages, are also interested in yours. Easy right!
However you do it, you want these page likes to look legit, so spend some time creating some personas if you do it yourself, and don’t just pick the cheapest spammers.
This is the kind of graph I have on three separate pages now.
Nice right?
Despite how easy this all sounds, it can be pretty time intensive, so my advice is to build several future alignment campaigns from one set of research.
Step Three – Keep the Page Clean
The problem you may find with this is that you get a lot of spam fans following your page, these have no value to you. Spend some time on a weekly basis finding the spammiest of the spam and remove them. They are hurting your reach, and your brand alignment.
Step Four – Make the Most of It!
You’ve got the new fans, but remember that there is only a limited new audience in the related groups you align with, so make the most of your fresh reach. Before you set off the alignment campaign make sure to get some paid ads and fresh content ready to go for the page.
The idea behind this is that once you get some followers from your page selection, they will create new alignments between your brand and other pages. This can create a self perpetuating cycle of related page growth (as you see in the graph above).
If you like this post, like my Facebook Page. My friends list is filling up fast so I’m going to transition to pages soon!
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