Facebook likes act as a metric which is used to gauge the quality of content by search engines, so the more likes you have, the better and more likely that your content will appear higher in the SERPs. Don’t believe me? Check out this post on social search for more info.
People can either like content on your own blog or site (if you have the proper plugin/apps installed) or they can like your Facebook fan page itself. You need your own Facebook fan page to enable most of this, and I cover how to set it up and enable likes on your own content in this post on how to make a page on Facebook.
But how do we get more Facebook likes? Aside from creating great content which encourages people to like your content of its own volition, let’s look at 8 effective ways of how to get Facebook likes.
How to Get Facebook Likes
Advertise Your Facebook Page – Duh! Sure it’s a no brainer, but make sure people know that you have a Facebook fan page for your business or website by advertising it everywhere you advertise everything else. Put your Facebook page’s address on your business cards, prominently link to it on every page of your site, mention it in person when you get a chance, put it in your email signature for every time you send out an email, etc. Do you article market? Why not take a break from linking to your website and instead send them towards your Facebook fan page?
Get Your Friends to Like You – You’ve already got friends on Facebook hopefully, why not make them work for you? Send out a post where you ask everyone to check out and like your page. If you have a lot of friends and they’re good people, that’ll get you a ton of likes fast. This can help you especially when you’re just starting out with a new page because that initial burst of fans of your page will act as social proof and get your non friends/strangers who check out your page to like it, as well, after seeing others have done it before.
Buy Them – I’m not going to go into too much about purchasing Facebook likes because this is the only method of how to get Facebook likes which I don’t do (I’m just a fuddy duddy like that), but there are plenty of freelance services where just like you would pay someone to write content for you, you can pay them to dig up some likes for you. There’s no guarantee that those likes will be very targeted or even come from real people, but it’s an option.
Use Facebook Advertising – Using Facebook’s own advertising network is a great way to get people to check out your Facebook page. I don’t liken this to purchasing likes because it’s a more legitimate way in my mind of getting likes and targeted likes at that. It’s easy to get targeted traffic and since it’s all through Facebook, it converts VERY well when it comes to getting more fans for your page.
Join Relevant Groups – Joining and engaging in groups which are relevant to your niche is a good way to get the word out about your page and consequently have people check it out and possibly like it.
Twiends – Twiends is a free service made predominantly for getting followers on Twitter, but it can also be used to get more Likes on Facebook for your page and views for your YouTube videos and for free at that, so check it out.
Incentivized Likes – I’m not sure incentivized is a word, but you can offer an incentive in exchange for getting people to like your content. Check out my Facebook page, I have a free guide to email marketing which you can only get if you first like my page. Liking the page takes you to a fans only section of the page where you can download the book for free. The incentive gets people to take the (albeit simple) action of liking my page as it gives them a reason to do so.
You can also put content like videos in your fans only section of your page so that people can only access the videos by being a fan, thus encouraging them to remain a fan. Add new content on a semi regular basis to your fan section and it almost feels like a neat exclusive membership community.
Comment on Blogs With Facebook Comments Enabled – You probably started reading this last one and saw “comment on blogs” and thought to yourself, really Paul? Blog commenting? Blog commenting isn’t very exciting or helpful for how to get Facebook likes until you start commenting on blogs with Facebook commenting enabled. This means that everyone participating in the comment section discussion is currently on Facebook.
Apply the same tactics you usually use when blog commenting (hint: how to blog comment) and people will see your good insightful blog comments and just like they would check out your site they’ll check out your Facebook fan page. The conversion rate for doing this and getting the like should be higher than a normal blogging scenario as you’re not trying to sell them something on a landing page, you’re just trying to get the free like, and plus people are much more eager to visit a page on Facebook than someone’s blog.
Speaking of Facebook pages and likes, I just set up Converting Copy’s fan page, so if you could find it in the kindness of your heart to “like” my page and grab your free email marketing handbook while you’re at it as my way of saying thank you, I’d appreciate it.