First of all, let me say it clearly, Likes are not just numbers. If your overall goal is just to brag about the number of fans you have on your Page, you should probably not even waste your time having a Facebook Page.
Likes are real users who are interested in your brand, who expressed an interest in your company with a click, and who may become customers or brand advocates. Your goal as a social marketer is to engage them with high quality content that provides real value and increase their loyalty to your brand.
Likes are just a vanity metric. What really matters are the users behind those Likes. What you want is 1,000 Likes from highly engaged users that will buy your products and share your brand rather than 1,000,000 Likes from users who barely know your name.
One of the most frequent objection to investing money to get more Likes is that Facebook organic reach is constantly declining, so those new fans will never get to see the content shared on the page, making them less valuable.
From my point of view, it’s still extremely important to grow a highly targeted, engaged fan base and spend money to get more Facebook Likes. Here’s why:
- While organic reach decreased for some brands, it didn’t for others. As long as you share great content, you’ll reach valuable audiences.
- 62% of millennials research products on Facebook before buying. A great Facebook Page with engaged customers will make you look trustworthy.
- A Facebook Page is not just to acquire new customers, it can also be an effective way to deliver great customer support (which will convert more new users into customers).
- Promoting content through Facebook Ads to engaged Page fans is cheaper and more effective than promoting to total strangers
- Even if every single Facebook Page post reaches only a small percentage of your fans, a well executed editorial calendar will allow you to reach most of them over time
If you’re now convinced that it makes sense for your business to acquire new, targeted Likes, you’ll be happy to know that we tested with our own money 5 of the most effective way to target users with Advertising to get more Facebook Likes. And after a week of tests, the results are in!
1) Targeting Interests
This is likely the most common way to advertise on Facebook, create your ads’ design and target it to people that have interests related to your product or industry.
The tough part here is to understand which Interests your customers have. Sometime this is extremely simple, sometime it can be tricky. The most simple way to discover relevant interests is to use Facebook Graph Search. Performing a simple search like “Pages liked by people who like “MYPAGE” will provide many useful suggestions.
Another powerful way to find related interests is to use the recently released Audience Insights tool. It allows you to analyze common patterns among an audience. You can, for instance, analyze job titles, education, common likes of your Facebook fans or any other audience like people with a specific interest or part of a custom audience. Here’s what you’ll get by analyzing users who like Jon Loomer:
Using the standard precise interests targeting you’ll reach any user that likes at least one of the pages/interests you selected.
This strategy allows you to reach a very broad audience and can be extremely effective as our data proved. The only downside is that you could be targeting some Facebook Pages that bought fake Likes thus targeting thousands of fake users. In the best case scenario you’ll only waste some money displaying ads to bots. In the worst case those bots could click “Like” on your ads and become your fans.
2) Targeting Interests intersection
Facebook recently released a new, extremely interesting way to target precise interests. Instead of targeting anyone who has any of the interests you picked, you can now target only those users that have all the interests listed, basically applying an AND logic instead of an OR one.
Here’s an example:
In the first example we’re targeting people that like either Nike or Adidas and we’re potentially reaching 17,800,000 users. In the second example we’re targeting only those users that like both Nike and Adidas with a much lower (but more focused) reach of 5,200,000 users.
This method of targeting the intersection of multiple interests can be extremely useful to target only users that are really interested in your product/market. Unluckily, to make it work correctly, the interests you’re using will need to have a very large number of Likes;otherwise the intersection will be too small.
In our test we had to use only two interests (Jon Loomer & Hootsuite) as adding a third one would have zeroed our potential reach. Still, also with two interests the reach was pretty small and likely increased the cost per Like.
Also, keep in mind that interests intersection is not available right now neither in the Ads Manager or Power Editor. You’ll have to use a third party Facebook Ads Manager like AdEspresso.
3) Customers’ Custom Audience
This tactic has a more limited reach but is extremely effective to populate your Page with highly engaged users. All you have to do is create a Custom Audience by uploading to Facebook the emails of all your customers, leads or newsletter subscribers and targeting them with advertising to have them like your page.
The upside is that these users already know your brand so they’re very likely to like your page and engage with the content shared in the future. The downside is that you’re not acquiring new customers but only existing ones.
Overall, targeting your customers through Custom Audiences to get more Facebook Likes is highly suggested , especially if you have a business with a lot of repeated purchases.
4) Customers’ Lookalike Audience
We just saw targeting existing customers through Custom Audiences is very effective but has a low reach and doesn’t lead to new customers. Luckily there’s more you can do with Custom Audiences: you can create Lookalike Audiences!
Creating a Lookalike audience out of your customers will allow you to target your Facebook Ads to people who are extremely similar to your customers. No need to find interests, age ranges or other patterns. Facebook will handle everything for you, analyzing your customers for common patterns and returning a list of new users very similar to them.
When using this tactic, remember: Facebook needs a good amount of data to run its algorithms and find relevant common patterns. I’d suggest you to use this targeting only once you have at lest 5,000/10,000 customers or newsletter subscribers in your Custom Audience and always optimize your Lookalike Audience for similarity rather than reach.
5) Facebook Page Lookalike
Finally, the last tactic we studied today still involves Lookalike audiences, but with a different twist – using a recently introduced feature.
While in the past you could only create a Lookalikes of a Custom Audience, today you can create Lookalike audiences also from a Facebook Conversion Pixel or from your Facebook Page’s fan. This can be extremely useful if you don’t have many customers but already invested time in creating a lively community on Facebook.
The same rules seen before apply here. Don’t use this strategy if your Page doesn’t have at least 5,000/10,000 likes, or the Lookalike won’t be reliable. Remember the more likes you have, the better Facebook will find similar people so if this tactic is not working for you currently, you may want to try it again a year from now when you’ll have a higher number of Likes.