Preventing Drop-off After a Facebook Growth Campaign

If you’ve invested some time and effort into growing a brand or company Page on Facebook before, chances are one of your tactics took the form of a gated contest or promotion where users are required to Like the Page in order to enter. And in doing this, chances are you’re familiar with the huge surge in Likes followed by the inevitable drop-off that occurs after the promotion is over from the more fickle users. This can be frustrating to experience, especially if you had hit an important milestone and these Unlikes are setting you back below it.So the question is, when you’re growing a Facebook Page, how can you make sure your new, more fickle fans stick around?

First, to understand how to make them want to stay, we need to understand why they tend to leave. The fans we’re talking about here are not the ones that already love your brand (not because your brand is unlovable, but more likely because they don’t know what it’s all about yet). They are also not the ones that take a laissez-faire approach to their Facebook browsing and they do care if irrelevant or unengaging posts appear in their newsfeed. These are the fans that you likely needed to incentivize to “Like” you, and you’re going to need to work a little harder to keep them once the incentive has been claimed.

Now that we’ve thought through the psychology of why they leave, here are some tips that will give them a reason to stay:

1. Build History: Make sure that before you execute a promotion, there is plenty of great content populated on the Page that new fans will find value in. You only get to make one first impression, so when they visit your Page make sure that although your content may not have been the reason they visited, it makes it worth their while to stay.  What makes your content great? It is both relevant and offers value that they can’t easily obtain elsewhere. For example, if you’re a food brand, populating the Page with lots of great recipes and creative uses for your product will help new fans see that you actually deliver unique value and aren’t just there to advertise to them.

2. Tie Into Your Brand: When you plan your promotion, make sure that your incentive is somehow related to your brand or at the very least, that the people most likely to be attracted to the incentive are the type of people that are typically attracted to your brand.  For instance, a Leafs tickets giveaway might attract a LOT of people and drive those Likes up, but if you’re a boutique women’s clothing brand, that prize will likely attract fans that aren’t going to be interested in sticking around after the contest closes.

3. Don’t Neglect Existing Fans: Now that you’ve got the engine running, it’s time to start thinking about how to keep it going. Make sure that maintenance is just as big of a priority as growth. Just like with customers, it’s easier to keep an existing fan than acquire a new one, so don’t let your growth goals make you forget about all the fans you already have. Targeting some content, offers, and promotions at existing fans and making sure they are eligible to enter contests targeted towards prospective fans ensures that they don’t feel as though you are only after growth and numbers.

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