Use the engagement on your advertisements to harvest more Facebook page likes.

Facebook page likes are a measure of how many people like your business enough to receive your posts in their newsfeed. It’s a measure of social proof that signals your value to potential customers. 

There are lots of ways to grow your Facebook business page, from content creation to paid advertisements. This article will discuss how it’s possible to use ads for a product or service to grow your business Facebook page likes without paying for them directly.

Before we dive into the process, it’s worth noting that Facebook does have an option to run ads with the sole purpose of increasing your page likes. Here at Algorithmic Global, we believe that the likes on your business page are worth boosting but aren’t worth paying for specifically (unless you have the reason to do so).

Grow your audience

The people who like your Facebook business page are the ones who will be served your content without you having to pay for it. That doesn’t mean every piece of content will be served to every person; Facebook’s algorithm decides who sees which posts. But by being someone who has liked your page, they are in the mix of people who might be served your post.

It’s worthwhile to grow your page likes, for the social proof. Since every piece of content is served at Facebook’s discretion, the goal is to do this as simply and cheaply as possible. In a nutshell, advertising simply for “page likes” costs money that you can use to promote a product/service.

How? By using your post’s engagement to find new potential users to like your page.

Step-by-Step: An Algorithmic Global case study

We have recently begun a campaign to find clients for website design that illustrates this process well. The first step was to create a landing page (learn more about landing pages here) where we could direct traffic. Then, in the ads manager, we set up to campaigns:

1. Website Design Traffic
2. Website Design Engagement

We used the same post for both ads, which allows any likes/comments to be shown by both campaigns. Essentially, we told Facebook’s algorithm that we wanted to use the same post in two different ways.

1. Facebook would serve our ads to those who would click on it.
2. Facebook would serve our ads to those who would engage with it (likes/comments).

We set a budget we were comfortable with and let the algorithm do the rest. We set up an engagement ad in the first place to show other users who view that particular piece of content that it’s worth seeing.

After it ran for a bit, we checked in to see how many likes/comments we had received. 

Still with me? Now here’s the trick to getting Facebook page likes. We can expand this list of people who have engaged with the page and invite each of them to like our page. It’s free and doesn’t take very long.

How long should you leave your Facebook engagement ad running?

It would be best if you left your engagement campaign running long enough to get your desired amount of social proof. At Algorithmic Global, we generally say ~100 likes.

It’s possible to keep paying for the engagement and continue to gather more Facebook page likes. The benefit of using engagement ads over any other ad type is that each engagement is usually cheap.

How much should each Facebook ad engagement cost?

The price for engagement varies depending on the quality of the photo, how the ad is written, and the audience. We’ve seen as low as a consistent $.08, and as high as $.30. 

You can get away with higher costs per engagement (and clicks) as the product’s or service’s price increases.

Will everyone who’s invited to like your Facebook page accept the invite?

Unfortunately, the conversion of people invited to like your page to those who do like your page is not 100%. We’ve seen as high as 1 in 5, but it usually settles around 1 in 20.

Using Facebook Ads

Facebook ads can be a great way to build traffic to your product, service, or website. They can run for as little as $5/day. Using this trick to increase your Facebook page likes causes their value to go up as more people see your content.

One of the tricky parts of advertising with Facebook is knowing when to tweak ads that aren’t working at an appropriate cost. After a few days of consistent underperformance, we make the necessary adjustment and try a new strategy. Using Facebook ads to sell a product or service and piggybacking Facebook page likes on the back of that objective makes getting new likes cheaper than if likes were the sole objective.

This method is a great way to grow your page to convert Facebook users who see your ads into people who like your page. When they become part of that list, the likelihood of seeing your content organically increases but still depends on Facebook’s algorithm.
Algorithmic Global would love to help you set up this type of structure for your product or service. Reach out via our contact page, and let’s find out what we can do for you! With two ads, you can get Facebook page likes AND promote your company’s product or service. What are you waiting for?