Today I have a quick and super effective Facebook hack to share with you. It’s all about viral videos, but don’t worry – you don’t have to create the videos yourself. You’ll be sharing viral videos other people have already made and then taking advantage of the Facebook algorithm to grow your own page’s following.
I can’t take credit for this tip. I actually learned about it from Mei Pak in a workshops she taught at Midwest Craft Con a year and half ago and I know that Mei had just learned it from someone else. I figured I would share it with you just in case you haven’t learned about it yet.
I made a short and sweet screencast for you to show you how it works. Take a look!
Have you tried this? If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to give it a go and then report back here and tell us what happened. I saw results right away when I first started doing this and I continue to see great results from it. And the best part is it’s free and it’s entirely kosher. Nothing shady going on here.
A larger and more engaged Facebook audience is good for business and I hope this tip is helpful to you.
Do you ever notice that Facebook suggests people who already like your page? I started “inviting” people this way a while back until I kept noticing people who already liked my page had the “invite” button–people I could verify liked my page, like my husband or my mother. I know you can’t fix Facebook ????, but I just wondered if you ever experienced this issue as well.
Hmmm…that is odd!
I was just about to say the same thing that Jenny said…. 2 people in my list (when I checked as you described) already Like my Page!! might it be that they haven’t been shown anything by FB for a long time (due to FB algorithm) = therefore not considered as being ‘actively’ Liking and Commenting?????
This seems like a good tool to add to my social media process. Thank you for the post!
I hadn’t realized that you could invited people to like your page from the list of folks that like a post. This will be very useful.
Curious why you mention videos not any popular post…
Oh sure. It can be any popular post. Sorry to not have mentioned that. Often videos perform very well on Facebook so I chose them as the focus here, but any popular post would work just as well.
Native Facebook Videos get higher engagement than both YouTube and Instagram videos on social media so it makes sense why this strategy would work 🙂 Thanks for sharing!
This is great! I’ve tried the inviting people technique before but I didn’t know about the boost in the algorithm. Thanks for the tip!
I learned this technique a while ago and have used it for the FB page that I administer (my university department). It works well.
Another thing that I read was that the comment that you write to present the video or link on your page should be short. The fewer words that you put, the more clicks the link gets, is the advice I saw. In a way this is reverse causality– an extremely enticing video or link NEEDS fewer words to get people to click. But I think it’s still a good rule. I had previously been writing too much in my comment and after reading the advice, I realized that I was using up people’s attention on my words rather than on the thing I wanted to show them or I was giving too much information so they didn’t need to click. I started writing much shorter comments and my click rate and likes went up, thus giving me more exposure. So that is something everyone could also try. Make your comment really pithy (yours was pretty short but could be even shorter, like “Makes me want to play with clay!”) and try to make it kind of mysterious or intriguing so they want to click the content and find out what you mean.
Great tip!
Thank you for this information, Abby! I love all of your advice and TRUST you as the source to come to for all my questions about my soon-to-be quilt related business.
Thanks for sharing this Abby. Last week I had a video go viral on FB. After reading this, I went back and invited over 500 people to follow me. One thing I did notice: A viral FB video does not turn into an equal number of new Subscribers. I’d love to know how to take Facebook Likes and turn them into real Subscribers!
Congratulations! Can you clarify what you mean by subscribers?
You can also download a free Chrome extension called Facebook Invite Tool, and then that puts an extra button right at the top of the list of people who’ve liked your post. The button allows you to invite all the people who haven’t yet liked your page at once, so you don’t have to scroll down and click to invite each person individually. 🙂
Wow!! So awesome.
I know right! I’m all about making things as simple as possible. 🙂
Great post! I’m going to give it a try for Stash Bandit!
I’ve been using this technique with select boosted posts for a while and it works great. I tried this yesterday with a couple viral videos and got a few new people that I could invite that didn’t already like my page. And best thing this was free. Multiply this by 365 days a year and I’d say this is a sure fire way for consistent and meaureable growth. Thanks for sharing this Abby.
You’re welcome, Matthew. These little steps taken every day add up to big results.
Well said Abby – larger and more engaged Facebook audience is great for business!
I was just on your FB page and your cover video caught my eye the moment the page uploaded 🙂 so compliments for that detail 😉
Thanks.
I don’t know about the “entirely kosher” part given that Bored Panda and sites like it are known for stealing other people’s creative work and then making money off it by using it without permission to get ad revenue on their site. Doing this is just more of the same disregard for the creative work of others.
Well, you certainly don’t have to share a video from Bored Panda. You could share a video from a source you respect and enjoy.
This info was more relevant a few years ago when this was originally posted. But since Facebook did the bait-and-switch to a pay-to-play model for their business page posts (posts in pages, not groups), I have to wonder if putting any energy into building likes to my page (page, not group) is worthwhile at all anymore. Even if you have more people liking your Facebook page, new posts will still only be shown to a relatively small % of your likers.
So unless you have well over 10k likes, posts from your page will never even be shown your posts in the future. Most FB gurus I’ve come across in the past few years rec that we put our efforts into FB groups rather than pages since these are communities and posts aren’t subject to the same algorithm .
Well, yes and no. Yes your business Fb page posts will be shown to a small percentage of people, but you should still use it, it’s a good way to draw in new people (to your group, email list, website, etc). Plus, if you post something (say a new product, or an upcoming collection announcement) on your Fb page and it gets engagement (likes, shares, comments, etc), then you can use that exact post to create an ad from and target cold audiences, warm audiences like those who have visited your site in the last 180 days, etc. If the post already has engagement, Fb sees that it’s something your audience wants to see, and it will show it to more people and usually at a lower cost per impression or click (whatever your ad objective is). The more engagement you get, the more it tells Fb it’s popular, and the greater the reach of the ad. That’s a very effective way to get posts out to your people (whether they be current Facebook page followers or a cold audience) for very cheaply. You can literally run an ad for like $1 a day and get a lot of eyeballs on it, depending on your targeting. 🙂
There are some really engaged Facebook pages out there. I don’t think it’s worth giving up. This tactic takes just a few minutes in total and is quite effective. In addition to Dana’s point, I would also say that if you want to work with brands, get a publishing contract, design a fabric line, etc. those companies will look at all of your social media stats so to me it’s worth the investment of a small amount of energy to keep growing.