Twig the Fairy was desperately poor.

Twig, a children’s performer, spent 10 months of the year working at Renaissance festivals, often living without running water or heat.

So her boyfriend, Lou Abramowski, used Facebook marketing tactics to help her raise more than $27,000 to write a children’s book.

Today Twig has 200,000 Facebook fans, and her merchandise sells so quickly that she can’t keep it in stock. “Her contract values have skyrocketed since this audience has been built,” says Lou.

Lou is a co-founder of 8th Bridge, whose client list includes 1-800-Flowers, Hallmark, Brooks Brothers, and Delta Airlines. And Twig the Fairy.

In his Mixergy course, he shows you how to turbocharge your Facebook marketing. Here are three highlights from the course.

1. Don’t Be Afraid

You might have 100,000 fans, but Facebook only shows your posts to the ones who regularly interact with you.

So when too much time passes after their last interaction, they stop seeing your posts on their News Feed.

“Although Facebook doesn’t expose or give any information about its algorithm…the reality is that after 24 hours, [a fan’s] affinity with [your Page] starts to decrease if [they] haven’t been shown a post, ‘liked’ a post, or commented on a post,” says Lou.

But you’re afraid that posting more often will annoy your audience!

So how do you stay in their News Feeds?

Overcome Your Fear

You have to post every single day.

“Facebook calculates…affinity between Pages and users,” says Lou. “The stronger that affinity between a Page and user, the more often that Page’s content gets showed to that user inside the News Feed.”

Lou says if your fans get annoyed with daily posts, that means your content isn’t good enough. Try winning them over with humor, and make sure the content you’re posting is available exclusively on Facebook.

2. Don’t Offer a Red Pill

Have you ever posted a great external link you thought your fans would really enjoy, and it got no love?

“We noticed really early on that by sharing hyperlinks inside the News Feed, we almost invariably lower our interaction rate,” says Lou. “Our ‘like’ count and our comment count was always just abysmal.”

Why don’t fans engage with external links?

Lou says that people don’t like to leave Facebook when they’re in Facebook. And if they click on your external link and do leave Facebook, they’re unlikely to come back and comment on the post.

So how do you keep them engaged?

Keep Fans in Facebook

To get your audience to click and to interact, don’t use external links. Instead, keep them in Facebook and let them know they can view the content without leaving the site.

Lou says, “I think any sort of visual or copy that communicates to the user that they’re not leaving Facebook will almost always help Facebook users to get a little more engaged. And [external] links communicate the exact opposite.”

Lou even likes to add “without leaving Facebook” to the end of his posts: “It always converts better on a click-through rate when I include [those] words.”

3. Encourage Them to Speak Up

While “likes” occasionally show up in the News Feeds of your fans’ friends, comments are more likely to make your post go viral.

But Lou says it’s harder to get comments because “there is so much more effort into typing some sort of an answer than there is in just lifting their forefinger to click the ‘like’ button.”

So how do you solicit more comments from your fans?

Offer a Prompt

Lou says one way to get more comments is to rewrite your open-ended questions as fill-in-the-blanks.

“Imagine somebody who runs an ice cream shop,” he says. “Maybe it’s a hot day out. It’s a 95-degree day and it’s humid. A post might be something like, ‘On hot and humid days the most refreshing flavor of ice cream is ______.’”

Be sure to phrase it so that the blank can be answered with a single word, rather than a long phrase or sentence.

“The simpler you make it for people to interact, the more likely they are to do it,” says Lou.

Cheat Sheet written by April Dykman.