In the last post, I talked about the kind of content you should be creating in order to encourage your audience to engage with you on Facebook.

But what if you don’t have a large Facebook fan base?  

Where should you start?

Grow Your Facebook Fan Page

The next step (or the first, if you’re just getting started) is to build a targeted Facebook following.

By creating a community on Facebook, you have the opportunity to connect with that audience time and again at a low cost. And we all know that the more you touch people and connect with them, the greater chance you will have of converting them to paying customers.

How Do You Build a Targeted Following?

Start by targeting the people who have visited your website.

Facebook has given us a ton of great tools for reaching our targeted demographic on Facebook, but one of the most useful is definitely the remarketing pixel. The remarketing pixel is, essentially, code that you place on your site that allows you to track website visitors and create ads specifically for them.

By targeting your website visitors with your content, you have additional opportunities to engage with a group of people who already know who you are, strengthening your relationship with them. It also gives you the chance to reaffirm your own expertise in your field.

What if your web traffic is low?

You can actually target anyone who has been on your website in the last 180 days, as long as the code has been on your website that long. However, if you still don’t have enough people to target for a website custom audience, you can actually create a lookalike audience using the small audience you do have.

To create a lookalike audience, Facebook analyzes the demographics of the audience you want to replicate and finds the 1% of Facebook users who are most similar to that audience.

Other audiences you should target for building your Facebook following?

Your Email List

Just like your website traffic, your email subscribers were interested in what you have to offer or they wouldn’t have subscribed to your list. By getting them to engage with you on your fan page, you are able to engage with them in a different way and touch them repeatedly, ideally turning them from email subscribers to customers.

Even if your email list is really small, you can create a lookalike audience based on your email list and target people most like those on that list. It’s a great alternative for business owners who are just getting started.

You do have to have at least 100 people on your list who can be matched to Facebook user accounts, so if you still can’t meet those requirements, you may have to target based on user interests. This should, however, be your last resort.

Promoting Your Blog Content

Promoting website content like your blogs is a great way to continue expanding the size of your website custom audiences.

You may have to start with lookalike audiences for getting new Facebook fans, but as you promote your blog content to those new Facebook fans, they will continue to go back to your site time and again, checking out the new content you’re producing.

Remember, you are building trust and authority through value!

Stay tuned…in the next post, I’m going to tell you exactly what you should do with those Facebook fans!