Getting your Facebook Fan Page to grow can be easy at first. You pester your high school and college friends to join, so you have more than your wife and mom as your Facebook Fans. You might also do a quick blog post (see here and here) or blast out a message to your Twitter followers.
All of these are great places to get your fan base started and give you a nice starting base. Recently, I did an experiment on my other blog, LostInTechnology to get people to join my Facebook Fan Page for that blog. This experiment centered around Google Wave.
To set the story up, Google Wave is a new service that has generated a lot of buzz. It is also, currently, invite only. I was fortunate enough to get a Google Wave invite, and once I got the invite, I had several more to give away. Instead of being nice to my friends, I decided to give them away to my dedicated reader base at LostInTechnology, but I didn’t want to give them away for nothing, so I asked my readers to join my Facebook Fan Page in order to receive an invite.
It was a simple task that people were willing to do in order to get an invite to Google Wave. One thing to consider when giving away something to your readers is to make sure it fits the audience. Google Wave is a new technology product that is in beta, and it fits right in with what my audience is interested in at LostInTechnology. They were very excited about the technology and wanted to get involved with it an learn about how it worked. I made it easy to get in on the fun with very little investment.
Giving back to your readers is something I recommend you always do, but a lot of times you can ask for something in return if you are giving away something with enough value. How do you drive readers to follow you on Twitter or join your Facebook Fan Page?
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January 5th, 2010 at 1:56 am
Interesting short term strategy: but did you keep those fans? Are they really engaged?
There may be some merits to reaching a critical mass: no one wants to go to the deserted bar. But having people fan your page and then hide it or ignore it really doesn’t realize your actual objective, does it? (which is likely to inform or educate?)
Now: if this was just a way to get people to take that initial step to fan your page and now you’re able to really get them to become passionate brand advocates, that would be fantastic. I’d just be concerned that these are google wave fans, not LostinTechnology fans…
January 5th, 2010 at 3:37 pm
I have kept the fans, but engagement is definitely an issue. Even before I added the new fans, most fans don’t make very many comments, so it can be very hard to gauge exactly how many are really paying attention.
I completely agree that you get a mixed bag of fans of Google Wave or fans of LostInTechnology. However, getting any fans to come to my blog and fan page is worth the little effort I put into that promotion. Also, I was able to interact with several of the people that requested invites on the fan page and in Google Wave. I’m sure I didn’t convert all of them, but I’m sure that I gained a few new fans from the promotion. I think one of the keys is to make sure your giveaway is appealing to the types of people that frequent your blog. Fans of Google Wave are probably technology enthusiats, so the content on LostInTechnology would also be appealing to them. This way my conversion rate should go up some.
January 5th, 2010 at 4:23 pm
You’re right; the incentive IS aligned with the same demographic so it’s a nice fit.
Incidentally, even if they don’t stay as fans, name recognition can go a long way. I did a google search last night and LostInTechnology was one of the results, and because of this post I clicked on it!
January 5th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
What were you searching for?