The logo for Jo Francis. There are two orange squares, one big and one small, that overlap in the corner. The words Jo Francis interrupt the line of the larger square.
An image of a laptop with the facebook log in page on it. On the left side of the image there is an orange rectangle with a grey rectangle layered over the top with orange text reading ‘Growing your Facebook page following with Facebook Ads’ and on the right side of the image there is an orange circle with white text reading ‘Jo Francis’

Growing your Facebook page following with Facebook ads

/ Facebook Ad Tips / By

Growing your Facebook page organically can be tough. It’s a slow process. You spend a lot of time sharing the page with friends (are they even your target audience?) and waiting for people to “maybe” click through from your website or your email signature. 

What is a Facebook page growth campaign?

A Facebook page growth campaign (using Facebook ads) is not cheating. You’re not buying likes (believe me this used to go on, back in the day, and there are pages with thousands of fake followers) you’re actually paying to present your Facebook page to your ideal target audience and offering them the chance to like your page. They are real people, making a genuine choice to follow your page. The likelihood is that they just hadn’t heard of you before! 

What’s the benefit of a Facebook page growth campaign?

If you’re someone that’s actively engaging with your audience on your Facebook page and regularly posting interesting content then you’ll see that as you get more “likes” (Facebook page followers) you’ll start to get more reach and more engagement. 

And ultimately what this is doing for you is building a warm audience, not just an audience available for you to engage with on your Facebook page, but building a warm audience that you can retarget in the future with Facebook ads for your products or services (if you choose to). By being consistent with your posting on Facebook you’ll start to develop relationships with the people who are in your audience. And inevitably you’ll start to see them come across to your website, whether to engage further with you there by reading your blogs, listening to your podcasts or actually making purchases from you.

How much does it cost to grow your Facebook page using Facebook ads?

One great example of a Facebook likes campaign is Rhiannon Abbott from The Epsom Bakehouse.

We set up Rhiannon’s Facebook page growth campaign back in February, 2020, and to date she has had 4855 new page likes which is absolutely amazing. Rhiannon is spending just two pounds daily on building her Facebook likes and the ads in this campaign have reached 53,472 people. She’s paying four pence per new like on her page. (Note that this is an incredibly successful campaign and the average cost per like is generally around 25 pence).

This made an absolutely phenomenal difference to Rhiannon’s business. She is an online bread maker, and she creates and sells courses related to bread making. Her offerings have absolutely gone through the roof during this period of lockdown. 

Important to note though that Rhiannon hasn’t just sat back and waited for sales. She’s been consistently posting on her Facebook page, doing tons of Facebook Lives, offering a stack of things that people can get for free. Her audience can watch her baking and join in from home, they can watch replays of her doing live baking, and she has really worked hard to engage with her audience, and as a result, is reaping the rewards in terms of sales of her courses.

The audience for The Epsom Bakehouse Facebook page growth campaign is targeted towards people who might have an interest in bread making at home. We’ve specifically created a lookalike audience for this campaign. Rhiannon already had her website visitor audience set up, and we created a lookalike audience. This audience is the closest match to the people who are currently her website visitors, so these are her ideal target audience. And as the results suggest, this has proved hugely successful.

So now Rhiannon has 7004 Facebook page followers and her post reach this week alone was 7099 people. She has built up a huge community and a really loyal following. When you look at some of the activity on her Facebook page, she’s doing Facebook lives that are getting 250 plus engagements. Plus she’s constantly getting people messaging her, talking to her via the page and engaging with her, which is exactly what she wanted from the campaign. This has  helped maintain the success of her business in this particularly difficult time. 

Who should opt for a Facebook page growth campaign?

This type of ad campaign might not appeal to everybody (not everyone wants to be so active on their Facebook page) and not everyone will see the massive growth that Rhiannon has been fortunate enough to experience. However, it’s still a worthwhile campaign for so many businesses (particular those that focus on a specific geographical area as it’s an ideal way to target your local audience) and certainly one I recommend for a lot of my clients to start building their followers and their warm audience.

It’s an ad campaign that can be run incredibly cheaply, you can start from as little as a pound a day. And as long as you engage with those people that land on your page and start to follow you, you will start to see results; whether that’s an increase in engagement, or driving people across to your website from your Facebook page, or you may actually be selling on your Facebook page and see an increase in sales.

Do you need the Facebook pixel for a Facebook page likes campaign?

And for those of you that have been putting off using Facebook ads because you haven’t yet created and installed the Facebook pixel on your website (or perhaps you don’t even have a website yet), this is the ideal campaign as it doesn’t need the pixel involved at all (because you’re driving people to your Facebook page and not to an external site).

Want to find out more about how I can help you with a Facebook page growth campaign? All the details are here.