How to build your Facebook audience

Even though Facebook is limiting how much of your audience sees any given message, it’s often still the best choice for an organization to reach their target market. Many online marketers say that Facebook is a must for every organization, although I don’t think I would go that far.

The single quickest way to build your audience on Facebook is simple: Pay Facebook.

It hasn’t always been like that, but it definitely is now. It takes money, in the form of paid advertising. But before you invest a lot of money, be sure that you really know who your target market is, and that they’re on Facebook.

Let’s take a look first at a multi-year system with a decent investment, then examine a short-term option with a far smaller investment.

Multi-Year System

The system I’m going to describe is based on a the activities of a client of ours, Danny Chabino, owner of World Imports, a Rustic Furniture Store.

They started from scratch in 2011, but invested about $1,200 a month the first year, then $400 a month after that. After that first year, he had about 3,000 likes, and now, after investing $400 a month for another couple years, he has 18,232 likes.

I’ve taken what Danny shared with me, and systemized it. First, here’s the system for when you’re first starting out:

1. Set your initial goal for number of likes, along with a monthly budget, and your ideal target date.
2. Invest your budget specifically in ads with the goal of increasing likes. Currently, you go to your company page, click the “Build Audience” option toward the top right, and select “Promote Page.”
3. For daily budget, take your total monthly budget and divide by 7, then select “7 days” under the Schedule. Be sure to also specify location, interests, age, and gender to get better results.
4. Facebook will show you how many likes they estimate you’ll get each day. Multiply that times 7 to see how many you’ll get each month, then use that to estimate how long it will take you to reach your goal.
5. As needed, adjust your budget on Facebook, or your target date in your plan.

Then you do steps 2 – 5 again each month until you hit your goal.

While you can use that same system later on, that’s not what Danny does. He took a break for a few months, and let his likes grow organically. During that time, he went from 3,000 likes to about 5,000 likes.

Then he set a new, much lower monthly budget, and invested that in promoting specific posts instead. He follows these guidelines for each of his posts that he promotes:

• Must have a photo highlighting an item he’s selling
• Text should include price and item dimensions

Of course, what you need to include will vary from industry to industry. Danny noted that when he started blurring out the background to better highlight the item in the photo, he saw his click-throughs double.

After about two years of investing $400 a month in promoted posts, Danny has seen his page grow from 5,000 likes all the way up to 18,232 likes.

So here’s a breakdown of roughly what Danny did:

Timeframe	Monthly invested	Ttl Invested during timeframe	Running ttl invested	Likes at end of timeframe
Months 1 – 12	$1,200	$14,400	$14,400	3,000
Months 13 – 18	$0	$0	$14,400	5,000
Months 19 – 42	$400	$9,600	$24,000	18,000

Of course, your mileage may vary.

Smaller Scale

So what if you’re willing to invest some money, but don’t want to make that sort of investment?

We recently experimented on the T&S Online Marketing Facebook Page, investing just $10 a day over the course of 7 days, for a grand total of $70. Here are the results we saw.

• Day 1 – 1 Page Like
• Day 2 – 15 Page Likes
• Day 3 – 16 Page Likes
• Day 4 – 11 Page Likes
• Day 5 – 15 Page Likes
• Day 6 – 11 Page Likes
• Day 7 – 17 Page Likes

That’s a total of 86 Likes. During that time, we also got 10 organic Likes, giving us a net gain of 96 Likes.

Obviously, we started out with an audience, possibly a bigger audience than you have. So once again, your results will probably vary. But a moderate investment should catapult you into the triple digits fairly quickly.

Need help?

That may all sound good, but you still don’t want to mess with it on your own. If that’s the case, we may be able to provide help. Contact us if you’d like to see if we’re a good fit for you.