

Ask HN: What's the most effective way you have found to get Facebook fans? - eeagerdeveloper


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il
The question you should be asking is, why do you want Facebook fans?

Is it to retarget visitors to your site through Facebook ads? In that case, a
Like button on your site would work well.

Is it because your app has a viral element that requires appearance on
profiles/News Feed to grow? Then you should be incentivizing users to friend
you by offering them something of high perceived value in return.

Or do you simply want a high number of fans as a growth metric to show off?
For that, there are numerous enterprises online that will sell you as many
fans as you want at a reasonable price.

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flignats
That's a hard question to answer without providing some information on your
product/service. Il raises a good question in his post, 'why do you want
Facebook fans?.' That answer will help determine how you want to gather those
FB fans, because there are a lot of ways to do so and some are not so legit.

But, my short answer would be to leverage your existing product/service to
convert your active community into FB fans. Those will most likely be your
most engaging FB fan audience and easiest to become fans with the right
incentive. From there, your networks of fans will only start to grow.

Sorry I couldn't give you a specific answer, but without knowing your business
I couldn't provide a suggestion. In my own community, we encourage the players
of our games to become facebook fans through virtual currency, bragging
rights, and other incentives.

~~~
eeagerdeveloper
How often do you send updates to your fans?

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flignats
We update our fans through multiple mediums. Our community posts about us to
their walls and news stream, but we hardly contact our players through
facebook directly. We communicate with them through our FB fan page, provide
coupons, competitions, and other marketing strategies.

~~~
eeagerdeveloper
Hi flignates,

I just released a website to manage updates to your fan pages. Would you check
it out and tell me what you think?

<http://www.statusscheduler.com>

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nyellin
I would like to know if Facebook fanpages are useful for marketing. If you use
a Facebook fanpage, does it drive new users to your website?

~~~
eeagerdeveloper
I think facebook fan pages are useful in re-engaging users. I equate it to an
email list. You can gather fans like you gather emails for your email list.
When you push a message to your fans it is similar to pushing an email to your
email lists. Both don't drive more users to your site unless the user chooses
to share the email or the status message.

