Nine Ways to Grow Your Facebook Page Fanbase

Your Facebook Page community is like a garden that requires regular weeding, watering and sunlight.

If you don’t consistently nurture this “garden”, you won’t be able to harvest healthy fruits and veggies.

An experienced gardener knows that:

1. There are no shortcuts. Growing a community that sticks around takes time and effort.
2. Spending time in the garden each day makes it easier to identify your biggest fans, and the topics they care most about.
3. You can’t reap before you sow. Your Page’s community will blossom only after it’s received the appropriate amount of care and attention.

Here are nine ways to grow your Facebook Page fanbase:

1. Understand What Fans Want

The foundation of your success on Facebook is understanding who your fans are. What makes them passionate about your cause? What motivates them to share?

2. Define Specific Goals

The clearer you are about what you want to accomplish during a specific campaign the better. Do you want to acquire more fans in a specific geographic location?  Get people to share photos related to a specific topic?

3. Find the Right Farmers

Make sure you have the right people managing your Facebook Page. They should live and breath your cause (hopefully it’s personal to them), be able to represent your organization in a positive, magnanimous way, and know a little about how to use Facebook. The last criteria is the least important.

4. Curate Awesome Content

If you know your audience and have clear goals, then curation is mostly about finding awesome content. Great sources might include other Facebook Pages, Pinterest boards, niche blogs, and Twitter users.

5. Optimize Page Updates

Next, make sure you’re posting your awesome content in a way that gets the most amount of people talking about it. This means knowing the best time to post, what types of content people prefer, avoiding bad habits like cross-posting, and knowing which posts to promote.

6. Practice Pest Control

Yes, you will get jerks posting offensive stuff on your Facebook Page. This is a fact of life, and precisely why you want to configure your moderation settings to help prevent hateful and/or offensive language.

7. Create a Facebook Page Policy

A Facebook Page policy helps set the tone for your Page community, and also gives you something to point people to if they start misbehaving. The National Wildlife Federation has an excellent policy on their About tab.

8. Be Present

As Danielle explains in this video, one of the best ways to truly understand your community is to show up. Read comments on your posts. Check out what users have posted to your Page. Reply to commenters. Be part of the community.

9. Measure and Repeat

Facebook Insights are your GPS device to help you navigate towards your goals. Insights will show you what topics your fans like the most, which websites are referring the most traffic to your Page, and a lot more.