Like most social media managers, you are probably always looking for new ways to grow your audience on your Facebook page, right?
So you’ve done some good things:
- Set a content strategy and deliver original content
- Build relationship with your fans by answering to their comments and creating discussions
- Set a targeted social ad campaign which brings quality results
(if you have not any of these you should really consider doing it from now…)
And you’ve probably done some bad things too:
- Buy Fans (really bad thing)
- Organize contests that a re irrelevant to your business (thanks to you we will soon all have iPads)
- Post about anything except your business
What if I was telling you there was a way to grow your audience by simply looking into who is actually interested in your content and by learning what your audience’s interests actually are? Would you like that?
Well Facebook has brought the greatest tool for this: Graph Search
Jon Loomer has put it simply:
Graph Search isn’t getting nearly enough attention from marketers. It’s an awesome tool for learning more about your brand’s audience.
Let’s see how this can work!
1. Find out which other pages your fans like
First run a search to find out what other pages your fans like. This will give you a good insight on what your competitors can be and to what “style” your audience likes, for example:
“Pages liked by people who like We are Social Media”
Here are the results I got when I ran this search:
- LIFO (Media/News/Publishing)
- επιχειρώ (Business/Economy Website)
- AEGEAN AIRLINES (Travel/Leisure)
- Stickers for the Masses (Society/Culture Website)
- Olympic Air (Travel & Transportation)
- Public (Retail and Consumer Merchandise)
- In2life (Website)
- Techblog (Community)
- Samsung Mobile Greece (Product/Service)
- LG Hellas (Product/Service)
- Mashable (Media/News/Publishing)
- SandBox (Organization)
Once you did that, keep in mind the industries these pages are referring to, and proceed to the next search.
2. Find out the interests of your audience
Now run a search to determine the favorite interests of this same group of people. Here’s an example:
“Favorite interests of people who like We are Social Media”
Here are the results of that search:
- Social Media
- Andy Warhol
- Pablo Picasso
- Communication
- Marketing
- Design
- Traveling
- Photography
- Music
- Dogs
Some of these interests directly link to the pages you found with the first search. Some interests will seem more relevant than others, stick with these but also keep in mind the secondary ones could be a great way to create highly engaging posts.
Now, depending on the nature of your basis, there are endless other searches that you could run to pad your knowledge of your ideal audience.
Here are some other examples:
- Groups of people who like…
- Pages liked by [career like “marketers”] who like…
- Places in [city] visited by people who like…
- [Business type like “restaurants”] in [city] visited by people who like…
- Movies liked by people who like…
- Games played by people who like…
- Favorite music of people who like…
Get creative and experiment!
To me, the basic rule is that the more you will know about your audience, the more you will offer meaningful content to them. And this will for sure in more people joining in and contributing to grow your community.
This article was inspired by a recent publication by Jon Loomer.