How to get Facebook traffic

Two years ago, Twig the Fairy was doing pretty well.

She had 200,000 Facebook fans and her merchandise was selling so quickly that she couldn’t keep it in stock.

These days, Twig is doing even better.

She now has more than 260,000 Facebook fans and just did a crowdfunding campaign that brought in more than $30,000.

It’s all because of advanced Facebook tactics by Lou Abramowski, founder of Unbenchable Fantasy Sports on Facebook.

“People will tell you that Facebook commerce doesn’t work, but the proof is in the pudding here,” says Lou.

In his Mixergy course, Lou shows you how to turn Facebook fans into revenue. Here are three highlights from the course.

1. Don’t Beg for Likes

To grow, you need your content to spread to your followers’ networks.

But most people go about it all wrong. They think that the only way to reach a wider audience is to beg for likes and shares. “I think a lot of people [don’t know] how childish it sounds to encourage people to like their posts,” says Lou.

So how do you reach more people?

Make it all about them

Engage your audience in creative ways.

For instance, Lou tries to become a permanent fixture in people’s photo albums.

“Every Friday we share an image that has a bunch of different faces of Twig expressing emotions,” says Lou. “Within that image there is some branding element, whether it’s the Twig logo, the Twig website, the Twig online store, the Twig Facebook URL, whatever it is. And we have a call-to-action in the image that says, ‘tag yourself in this photo to tell us how your day is going.’”

Facebook has a limit of 50 tags per image, and every week 50 people tag themselves. “Now…this image shows up in their photo album,” he says.

And this tactic can work in any niche. For instance, Lou says, “[Mixergy] might be able to post something like 10 different types of entrepreneurs, right? ‘Which one are you?’”

“Anything expressive like that, people can’t resist themselves,” he says. “Everybody thinks, ‘my audience is not the typical Facebook user,’ but you can almost always find some clever technique to get somebody to do it.”

2. Win the Popularity Contest

You have to write posts that really resonate with people.

But when you’re starting out, you have no idea what will resonate. And you don’t want to look at what’s already popular on Facebook because your fans have seen that stuff a million times.

So how do you come up with fresh content that piques their interest?

Look at what’s popular elsewhere

Adapt proven ideas from other niches.

For instance, when Lou was starting Twig’s page, “Reddit had a very kind of core audience that didn’t have a ton of intersection with Facebook,” he says. “I realized [that] the content that exists on Reddit, particularly at that time, was stuff that was already socially proven…and on top of that, a lot of that content hadn’t yet been seen by people on Facebook.”

One example was a Reddit post that read “Sorry, I can’t talk right now because I’m walking my giraffe.” “That line alone was so funny that people started to up-vote it,” says Lou.

So to adapt it for Twig, he made it a little more whimsical. “I just simply replaced ‘giraffe’ with ‘unicorn,’” he says. “Thankfully, at the time, we had a perfect unicorn picture we could use, where Twig was pretty much walking her unicorn.”

3. Don’t Be a One-Hit Wonder

Lots of people are scared to post too often, so they just post once every couple of days.

“I think the most widely accepted best practice at the time was ‘don’t spam your [followers],’” says Lou. But people who follow that advice are “hurting themselves by letting days and days go by without letting individuals interact with them,” he says.

That’s because not every person sees every post. “While you might post every single day, that doesn’t mean that every single one of your viewers is consuming every single piece of content that you have,” says Lou.

So how often should you post?

Keep the hits coming

Lou advises people to post five times a day, with four hours in between each post.

“The only reason I gave that number that low is just level of effort,” he says. “I have and will
occasionally share 40 or 50 images a day, and you’ll see 10 posts going out every five minutes for an hour.”

So how does he post 50 times a day without annoying his audience?

“The reality is that if your content is annoying people [it] is not a result of the frequency that you post, it’s more a reflection of the quality of the content,” he says. “So if your big concern is that you’re annoying people with posting, you should probably look inward and see what you can do to improve the quality of the content.”

Written by April Dykman. Production notes by Jeremy Weisz.