How to grow your Facebook page under $250/month

 Having an engaged social media audience is critical for marketing.

And I said engaged, because it’s key. You don’t want just followers that never look at your content, don’t like your posts, and don’t comment and share.

Having real followers, people that are really and actively interested in your topic, is one of the most important social media marketing goals.

It has two purposes: first, when new people see your page, and they see an empty newsfeed with posts that nobody liked or commented, it implies no communication, no community. They are more likely to turn around and not bother sticking around. But if they see that it’s a lie, active community that’s worth being a part of, they will like your page and go through the posts, maybe interact with them.

The second purpose is that you can promote and sell your product easier to an audience who is interested in what you say and you offer. You may need erp applications development.

Here are a few tips what I used to grow my Facebook page.

1.  I posted more frequently

When I created my Facebook page, I didn’t use it as my marketing channel. It just sat there, and at most, I shared my blog posts a few times a month.

Maybe a year later, I started to actively work on my Facebook marketing.

This is what I did:

First, I started to post 2 times a week. I had new followers, but not significant, and my existing followers still weren’t interacting with my posts.

After a couple months, I created scheduled posts, an average of 1 post a day. Some days, I had 2 status updates.

I don’t know how many organic Page Likes I got, because I started to promote my page (I’ll talk about this later), but I had a few post likes, comments, and shares. My page started to work.

It’s a lot of work coming up with new post ideas, I still spend at least an hour a day looking for inspirations, blog posts, pictures, and other media I can share.

If you create a social media communication plan, your job will be easier.

My golden rule is that (on average)

• 20% of my posts are only text
• 40% of my posts include a picture or gif
• 75% of my posts include questions
• 15% of my posts send readers back to my blog
• 10% of my posts share other helpful articles and links (not mine)
• 5% of my posts are humorous
• 5% of my posts are polls

(Note that a post can be for example funny, a question, and picture at the same time, that’s why it’s not 100%)

This way, when I create my content calendar, I have a rough idea what to post every day.

2.  I boosted posts and sent invitations

My budget was really tight. I should have boosted every post I created, however, for budget reasons, I boosted only 2 a week, for $5 for only a day.

I had already played with different audiences, and I have one that works really well, so I used that audience. My objective was interactions (post likes, comments, shares, page likes).

After the one day of promotion, I had 80-100 likes on my posts.

I clicked on these likes, and Facebook lets you “Invite” people to like your page. So I invited all of them.

This way I gained some followers, and as I said earlier, I gained real followers – people who are already interested in what you are saying. Because they liked my post. What else do you need to make the lead more qualified?

These people interacted with my post. They showed interest. They liked it.

So if they have an invitation right after they liked that post, they still remember, and are more likely to like the page if you remind them.

3.  I tested and found a good audience

Before I started to use my Facebook page as a real marketing tool in my own marketing plan, I boosted some of my blog posts, and created a few ads just to get more experience, and see how it works.

After using many different interest-based target groups, I found out that lookalike audiences worked better for me.

I created an audience of my website visitors, another with my Facebook page followers, and my chatbot subscribers. And I created a lookalike audience for all of them.

The only change I made is that I changed the age of the targeted people, set only the United States as a targeted country, and I chose “marketing” as an interest.

It really depends on the content I am sharing, because all of them worked to some degree, but the audience that is most similar to my website visitors showed the best engagement.

I always watch the campaign stats after the campaign is completed, or after I turn them off because they don’t perform well, because I can learn a lot from my audience’s behavior.

Their demographics, sex, what device they use, etc. Then based on this, I can define the audience more to get even better results.

4.  I ran an ongoing campaign

You have to test different campaigns. Page likes, engagement, awareness, or lead ads – and you have to find the one that generates the most page likes for the lowest cost per like.

It can be as simple as a page promotion. Or the boosted post/invite trick. You have to test which works best to gain followers, and use that as an ongoing campaign.

It doesn’t matter if you can spend only $3 a day. Just have an ongoing campaign that generates likes on your page.

Run this promotion continuously, and closely monitor the results. If something changes in a negative way, change the ad creative, the copy, or the audience.

Conclusion

I am still waiting to see more of these results, because I just started this Facebook marketing plan.

But these are the strategies I am implementing in the next few months.

There is a lot of work in figuring out what type of messages bring the most results, which audience to target, and what is the best ad copy, but if you don’t spend time with it and test different ones, you will lose valuable likes, and waste the money spent on your boosts.

What other strategies are you planning to build into your Facebook marketing plan?