How to get more 'likes' on your Facebook page

There are more than 1 billion active Facebook users, that’s a huge audience for your business’ messages! And whilst not all of them are going to be customers, they’re all technically potential customers, so you want to be as engaging as possible to reach them with all the noise from other businesses and interesting things.

There are two types of ‘likes’ to talk about on Facebook, likes to your overall Facebook page, and then likes to the posts on your page. It’s likely you talk to your customers in places other than on Facebook, so tell them about your Facebook page! Add the links to your Facebook page to your newsletter, tell them about it on Twitter, add a link to your sales confirmation emails, run a competition through Facebook, make sure there is a clear link to your Facebook page on your website. All of these will get people heading to your page and hopefully ‘liking’ it, and be explicit about it “head to our Facebook page for exclusive offers and competitions” (just make sure that is what they’ll be getting). Also, by sharing lots of fun and interesting content, people are likely to share it with their friends, which will also spread the word about your Facebook page.

As a technically free-to-use platform, Facebook has had to find more ways to generate income. One of these has been making business pages work harder, and that means it’s more difficult to get your posts to reach your fans in the first place before you even start thinking about getting more likes on your content. And with the way that the Facebook algorithm works, the vicious circle is that the more interaction your posts get, the more they get shown to your fans. Facebook are going to make you work hard for it!

1. Images and Videos – photos get 53% more like, 104% more comments and 84% more click-throughs than text only posts, and 80% of online visitors are likely to watch a video whilst only 20% will read the text. Get visual!
2. Timing – posting when your fans are most likely to be online (and therefore see your post) is key, you can use your Facebook insights tab to find this sort of information out. In general, posting after midday is key; catch the lunch-break browsers or post after the traditional work day has finished. Test which times work for you.
3. Word Count – on average, posts with lower character counts are more successful in generating interaction. This is also key on Facebook as there is a limit to the amount of a post that they will show without the browser having to expand the post. Facebook is a scrollers’ heaven and they’ll want to be able to capture your post’s information quickly.
4. Interact – social media is designed to be an interaction tool, ask your fans to engage with you. Run a quick poll, get them to choose from a selection of photos for your next cover photo, all of these are asking people to interact with your post and hopefully will encourage people to do just that.
5. Good Content – this is probably one of the most important points, people will engage with your content if it’s good (and relevant)! Plan your content in advance so that you can share really interesting content that will get people interacting with it.