All new blogs have one problem, little or no social proof. That’s a problem I needed to solve as soon as possible. I remember hearing Pat Flynn suggest to not show your Facebook fanpage count until you had at least 150 fans or so. I think 1,000 is a little bit more convincing and that’s how many fans I wanted to get and do it fast.
Fastest Way To Get 1000 Fans
By far, the fastest way to get fans is to use Facebook ads. Some of you may be thinking, “This is going to get expensive.” I thought so too but with anything in online marketing you never know until you try it out for yourself. [Tweet This]
Lowering My Cost-Per-Click
With Facebook ads a higher click-through rate (CTR) means a lower cost-per-click (CPC). My strategy for getting a high CTR was to find another fanpage similar to Get 10,000 Subscribers and target their fans. This turned out to be Get 10,000 Fans. They currently have over 239k fans which gives me a nice broad fan base to work with.
Next, I looked at the page insights that Facebook now allows anyone to see. You can do this with any fanpage by clicking its’ Like tab.
I could see that the most popular age group for Get 10,000 Fans was from 13-24 years old. This was the age group that I wanted to target in my ads. When I went to create the ad the suggested bid was a bit high at over $0.30 USD. I decided to narrow the age group further to include 13-18 year olds only. This lowered my suggested bid all the way down to $0.02 – $0.12 USD.
1,029 Likes In 3 Days
After running the ad for about 3 days I got a total of 1,029 likes for $61.53 USD. My average cost-per-click was $0.06.
You might be thinking that all my fans are 18 and younger and that it’s not exactly a group of buyers. That’s okay because people on Facebook aren’t normally looking to buy anyways and I have nothing to sell.
What I wanted was some social proof at a reasonable price in a short amount of time. Before going over the 1,000 fans mark my like count would stay the same day after day. Now my like count goes up almost everyday without running any ads, all because I now have some social proof.
What do you think of getting social proof in this way? Is it a good investment? I would love to hear about what you think!
question: so are you getting the “Likes” directly on the Facebook display ad? Or users have to go to your Fan page first to click the Like button, if so, do you have the sample Facebook Fan page?
thanks!
John, if I read the ad insights correctly it is people directly clicking like on the ad itself. However, I also link the ad to a fangate to make it more likely they will click like if they click on the ad itself.
This is the url: https://www.facebook.com/Get10000Subscribers/app_206541889369118
Howie recently posted..Why I Wanted 1,000 Facebook Fans and How I Got Them In 3 Days
Goodday,
Nice revealation from you but I want facebook likes for on website and not on fanpage. What will I do differently? Please advise.
You have over 200k likes on your website. Maybe you should tell us how to get likes to our sites =).
hmmm….To be honest, up until this article, I hadn’t even thought of Facebook ads. Looks like it might be worth looking into, esp. since I’m having a hard time getting facebook likes for my blog’s fan page. Of-course the fact that I haven’t been putting my efforts in that direction might have something to do with it:)) Will certainly give FB ads a try and keep you posted. Thanks for bringing to the table a piece of advice I hadn’t considered.
Gazalla Gaya recently posted..Blog World, New York, 2012: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Interesting reading this as my last post was about the fuss caused at Reddit last week after they banned several big name sites due to them trying to game the system. The ‘crowdturfing’ industry is huge, with estimates that as many as 50% of the Twitter followers on leading brands were in fact bots, not humans.
All of which underlines the futility of worrying about followers or fans doesn’t it?
Adi Gaskell recently posted..Reddit, crowdturfing and online fakery
Interesting post about Reddit, Adi.That’s why I decided to use Facebook Ads instead of paying someone or some company to deliver likes. You don’t know if the fans are real or not and Facebook could decide to ban your page for buying likes.
Thanks admin for this nice sharing. I actually was looking for something to boost up my traffic and found your blog.
We’re a group of volunteers and starting a new scheme in our community. Your site offered us with valuable info to work on. You have done a formidable job and our entire community will be thankful to you.
Wow! I’m going to have to use that one. That’s a fantastic way to get your CPC down. Off to check out competitors insights…..
Phillipa Kiripatea recently posted..How to Keep Your Business in Your Clients Top of Mind
Hi Howie,thanks for sharing.
Having a good number of followers in the biggest social networks, is a symptom (in theory) of spreading good content in your niche.
It is a trend now, however, the purchase of followers.
And so many people are like sheeps : they see so many followers, and thus they feel safer to follow them too.
Erik Emanuelli recently posted..10 Free Tools to Monitor Your Social Media Influence
Besides running FB Ads there are other sites that offer ‘likes’ but the main objective of all this should be kept in mind while creating a new campaign. For example – A Fan Page with 1000 fans that doesn’t convert, share or even invite is practically worthless! They are just there for the number!!
Swayam recently posted..How to grow your Twitter Followers Strategy
This is a great article. 1000 fans in 3 days is really great. After having all those fans, than just start sharing posts to your fan page and you will get more fans every single day, and of course increase your earnings.
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I’ll try this soon!
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Hi Howie,
You went about getting your social proof quite clinically, I must say. That you have 1,029 fans is awesome. But what do plan to do with these fans?
How exactly does it help you since, as you say, you are not selling anything?
Your answers to these questions are very important to me. If you can spare the time, please do drop me an email. Will appreciate greatly.
Thanks!
NIK
Nikhil, great question! The reason I want to build a Facebook fanbase is to get traffic back to this blog. I want to increase the readership and subscribers to this blog and Facebook is just one way to get traffic to my blog posts.
Hi Howie,
that’s so resourceful. Plus the way you targeted your ad, you surely got some valuable likes because they were interested in the other fanpage.
How did you go about finding a fanpage similar to your target markets fanbase?
Anything special or did you just use the search box?
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Annie, the fanpage I targeted was one I was already aware of so I did not need to search for it. If I had to search for one I would just find the top 5-10 sites similar to my own and go to their fanpages. If there are no individual pages with a lot of fans you can always target all of them together.
Amazing I never thought I never thought it was possible to be done in 3 days.
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I’m pretty new to Facebook ads, and this might be a dumb question, but I tried doing what you said and I can’t get anywhere near 6 cents. The lowest I got the estimated bid to was $1.30. What am I doing wrong?
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Could you provide a little more info such as what keywords, countries and age groups you are targeting. What is the estimated reach that FB is reporting in your case?
Hi Howie,
Awesome way to generate 1000 fans in just a short amount of time. Did you turn off your ads? You had 1800+ likes for now, are they still running?
Try removing US, CA countries in your target location and you can even get lower costs per clicks. The traffic in the other regions is really cheap.
Goodluck to your next 10,000 fans!
Ryan
Ryan Cruz recently posted..How To Get Backlinks That Works Post Penguin
Yup, I stopped the ads after getting 1,000 fans. All the fans added after that have been organic which I attribute to getting the first initial 1,000 fans.
Why users still use to read news papers when in this technological
world all is accessible on web?