Facebook use to have an awesome tool where people can suggest fan pages to their friends, it was easy, fun, and it worked! Well back around November the button was missing, then a few weeks later it was back but only the admin of that page could suggest it to their friends. This became a little difficult and I feel it broke some of the online communities that were being created. It was very simple to use, you would click onto suggest to friends, and then choose the list of people you wanted to send it to, click select all and hit send! What a great concept. Once a page was suggested to you then you would get an alert once you logged into Facebook on the right hand side and you could choose to like or fan at that point the pages that were suggested to you. It was such a great tool and really helped the small businesses increase their fans. Now the button is still there on the pages and you can click it and still select all the people you want to invite to like your page but now there is a catch . . . IT DOESN’T WORK! Once you hit send it says a message was sent out but nowhere to be found is a message in your email or on Facebook that a page was suggested to you. Now where is the building community in that?
Us as small business owners need to increase our fans so we can build that relationship through our businesses. Here are a few ways to still grow your fans:
1) Talk about your page on your personal profile using @ (then type your page name) this way people that are your friends can see your post and go directly to your page and “Like” it.
2) Create list of friends up to 200 and send a message to them asking for their support to grow your online community and give the link to your business page.
3) Put your Facebook business page link in all email signatures, newsletters, marketing materials, voicemails, videos, blog, and website.
4) Post to your Twitter account to “like” your page
This can seem a little irritating and frustrating, trust me I am right there with you, but until Facebook figures out how to manage themselves and page we have to follow their rules. Because so many companies were and still are creating fake people on there, Facebook is trying to control the SPAM. One person can ruin it for all of us. With that being said stay away from buying “Likes” they are mostly fake people! I hope this information is useful, if you have any questions please feel free to contact us.