By John Eberhard
Practices create a Facebook fan page or business page in order to get their message out to patients or prospects. Then you can post items of interest on your fan page, creating interest and engagement. The people who will see those posts are people who have “liked” your fan page.
So one of the things a business needs to do is to get a lot of people to like their fan page.
It used to be that every person who liked your page would then see your posts. Then several years ago Facebook changed their system so that only 15-20% of the people who liked a fan page would see the posts. Many people didn’t like that change, but the point is still that you need lots of people liking your fan page.
So how do you get lots of people to like your page? Well, within your personal profile, you can ask your Facebook friends to like a business fan page. And some will. But one of the most effective and simple ways to get people to like your fan page is to run a Facebook ad campaign geared specifically to getting people to like the page.
I have recently run these campaigns for several websites and gotten new likes in volume for roughly $1.00-3.00 each. So a monthly campaign with a modest budget of just $100-300 can get you 100 new likes per month.
And of course, you can target people in one geographical area, or by a variety of other factors:
Demographics: Demographics are defined as different various factors that separate out or define different groups of people, such as gender, age, income level, etc.
On Facebook you can target people by their education level, by their income or net worth, whether they are homeowners or by their home type, by life events like a birthday or anniversary or their being away from home, if they have a new job or are in a new relationship, newly married, or recently moved. You can target people who are parents. You can also target people by their politics. You can target people in a certain industry or with a specific job title.
Interests: You can target people who have specific interests, like interest in a specific industry, or things like entertainment, family and relationships, fitness and wellness, food and drink, hobbies, shopping and fashion, sports and outdoors, or technology.
Behaviors: You can target users of specific mobile phone brands, people who recently bought a car, owners of specific car brands, people who made charitable donations and in what categories, people who have a specific operating system or use a specific browser, people who are expats from various countries, people who are investors of various types, you can select African Americans, Asians, or Hispanics, you can select people who have made recent purchases and in specific categories such as sports or household or technology, and you can select people who are recent home buyers or recent mortgage borrowers.
This targeting allows you get people to like your page who are your target public for your products or services. And for a modest budget, if you keep it going each month, you’ll build up your page likes to a high level.
Setting up a Facebook ad campaign isn’t necessarily easy. But with the information above you can talk to a marketing specialist and work out a Facebook Likes campaign that will benefit your practice and allow you to target the right types of people in your area.
