There’s nothing more helpful for a brand than loyal customers who keep coming back and help get the word out. Used properly, Facebook is a great way to build this kind of audience. Users who subscribe are regularly exposed to your content and have more opportunities to engage with your brand. Since this behavior takes place in public, in front of their friends, this also has a tendency to cause your audience to keep growing.
What does it take to convert visitors into subscribers, and keep those subscribers interested enough to share the content and grow your audience? The following pieces of advice should help, although you don’t necessarily have to implement all of them.
On-Site Call to Action – Ask people who visit your site to subscribe via Facebook. Most sites seem to do this at the top of the page, but since this is before users have even consumed the content, it’s not the most effective option. A better choice is to include a prominent button at the end of the post, after they have read the content and are most likely to decide they want to see more in the future.
In addition to subscriptions, this is also a good place to include a “Like” or “Share” button, so that they can tell their friends about the post. “Like”s are not as prominent as “Share”s, because a “share” is actually a post directly to a user’s wall, while a “like” is just an action. Unfortunately, Facebook has discontinued support for their stock “Share” button (without so much as an announcement). Thankfully, you can still allow users to share the post on their wall through third party plugins such as Sharexy for WordPress.
Facebook Comments – It is possible to install Facebook comments on your site, so that if users are compelled to comment on the post the comment will also be shared with their friends. This increases your exposure and opportunities for people to subscribe. (Unfortunately, these comments can’t currently be tracked.)
Facebook Ads – If your site doesn’t already have a lot of traffic and you’d like to build up a fan base, you can set up targeted ads on Facebook itself. You can select detailed demographics and choose keywords that users have talked about or shown an interest in. It’s generally a good idea to ask users to “like” your page from within the ad, and to mention the specific keyword they are interested in.
Share as Photos – Almost everything that you share on your Facebook page should be shared as a photo. You can attach text and links to your photos. While shared links will also display an image from the page, it doesn’t always pick up the image and the image is smaller than if it is shared as a photo.
Comment – Search for pages related to your subject and leave comments on these pages. Try to avoid hijacking the pages in a way that could appear spammy, although you have a bit more leeway with this if you are merely posting a link to a post on your blog, especially if the post is on-topic and isn’t a direct sales pitch.
Interact – Respond to comments on your page. Post questions on your page that people will enjoy contributing answers to. Run polls, both for fun and for feedback. Share links to other blogs with relevant information to help build reputation.