With the recent publicity of FaceBook and it’s new open graph businesses are scrambling to make the most of the worlds largest social network.
With over 400,000,000 people now signed up Facebook is proving to be almost as fruitful for marketers as Google is with reports of some internet marketers making up to $1000 per day. This figure is certainly not unbelievable either due to the viral nature of FaceBook and it’s ability to take a small idea and make it famous. Facebook has recognized that in order for it to succeed it will need to help marketers and business owners make money in turn expanding the platform even further.
5 days ago I saw a group on my friends FaceBook page. The topic was “I like your makeup…LOL JK, it looks like you got gangbanged by Crayola.” Yes and while it was a quite funny one liner I was surprised to see that within 48 hours since it’s start it had already accumulated over 120,000 fans. I refreshed it 3 times to find out what speed it was building momentum on and it was adding on average 50 new people every 5 seconds. It was insane.
My research has shown me that in order for a Facebook fan page to gain momentum and grow virally in a short period of time the page needs to get up to 20,000 fans. The question then becomes “How do we take a fan page with a good title which has 0 fans and expose it enough to build 20,000?”. Not only that but how do we take a fan page to 20,000 fans without spending a mint of Facebook PPC?
Due to Facebook being a fully connected 400 million member social network, it lends itself to a number of different methods. Today I am going to discuss 3 ways that will start driving traffic immediately back to your fan page.
First of all you need to utilize what resources you currently have available to you. Do you have a blog? A base of friends? A mailing list? Relationships with others in your industry?
Always start at home, if your idea is one that fits with the demographic of the resources you have then you are in a good position to begin growing your fan page in your inner circles in order to help it gather momentum and grow viral.
Secondly you need to start being more social, locate the Admin’s of similar fan pages to the one which you are marketing and get talking. A lot of people will add a message for you on their page if they like you or if you can give them something of value in return.
Finally a great place to build fan pages are topically related forums. Make sure you add value to the forum before posting so no one thinks that you’re only out for yourself. Then when the time comes where you have built sufficient credibility post the fan page in a way which will build interest and encourage people to join. If you can create a controversial or funny topic often the forum will come to life and various members will begin talking about the topic. I have also had great success in offering competition giveaways on forums to those who join.
The journey to reach 20,000 can be a tough one however if you use the strategies in this article and your topic is compelling enough to people, then your page can go viral. The potential benefits of owning a viral fan page are huge and well worth putting some time into. Once you have built the first viral facepage and your groups expanding rapidly like the Crayola group, the rest will feel like a breeze.
