I have been working with an organization called Elephants Never Forget for the past few months helping them raise awareness on the plight of Asian elephants; StepForth takes a great interest in assisting charities and non-profits with marketing and this is my project. In order to gain interest and increase their numbers on Facebook, I’ve stuck to the following 4 key tactics that have proved to be quite successful. Below outlines the specific tactics I used. These relate directly to our campaign; however the principles can be used for any page working to build their fans.
Cross Promote your Facebook Page using Twitter
Our Twitter followers were growing much faster than our Facebook Fans. In order to reap some of the benefits of these interested Twitter followers, I started tweeting about the content on our Facebook Page. Take the example below:
This tweet reveals a photo from one of our Facebook albums. In the same tweet, it informs the followers where they can see more pictures and gives them a link to our Facebook page. This gives the twitter follower a REASON to check out our Facebook page rather than simply asking them to check it out.
Join Groups related to your Target Market using your Personal Profile
A page cannot join a group, only people can. As there are many active groups about elephants, I didn’t want to lose out on the potential of these individuals knowing about our page and becoming active. In order to draw attention from these groups, I joined as Ashley, began commenting and liking their posts and slowly getting involved in their communities. Once I had contributed, I started sharing stories that were being posted on the Elephants Never Forget Facebook page. This intrigued a large group of people who I knew were already interested in Elephants and drew further interest to our page.
Ask your Current Fans to Spread the Word
If your current fans are passionate about your page, they will want to share it with their friends. The only obstacle here is that it can be difficult for them to know how to go about doing it. What I did to make it easy for our fans to share our page was added an app called “Invite your Friends.” I then took a screenshot of it and added it as an image to my status that said “We’ve just added an “Invite your Friends” app to our page! Please click and share our page with your friends.”
There are many free apps out there that you can easily add to your page to do this. The one we used is called Anka Social. It works well but the free version has advertisements that I could live without.
Write a Guest Post Linking to your Facebook Page
Another great tactic for building up your following is to participate online outside of social media. A great way to do this is by posting a guest blog about your topic. Guest blogs are great because they pull in an audience that may know nothing about you or who you are. We posted a blog on the popular ezine “Life as a Human” and from it, gained more followers on Facebook and Twitter.
Do you have any ideas to share?
If you have a few marketing tactics you can share please do so in the comments so our charity and non-profit readers can benefit from your wisdom. Thank you!