Her’s at MoonViper, we’re always trying out new things, and new ideas for doing things on the web. We decided we would run a little experiment, and see how much traction we could gain on Facebook with just a little bit of work.
We were working on getting an extra $100 in free Facebook ad credits, and needed to get 100 new likes to qualify. (For more information on this, see our blog post “Get $150 in Free Facebook Ad Credits“). We decided to see how many Facebook likes we could get to our fan page in a 48 hour period. Rather than simply allocating a bunch of resources to the project, and spending a bunch of money, we wanted to replicate as closely as possible the abilities of a typical reader of this blog, a small business owner with limited budget and staff, who can only invest a couple of hours of time into their marketing.
- Here were our ground rules for the experiment:
- We couldn’t spend any money
- We could only invest a total of 2 hours
- The experiment would be over in 48 hours
- We would publish all of our experiences here
So how did we do? We got 528 likes to our Facebook page in 48 hours, and we didn’t spend a penny do to it. In fact, Facebook “paid” us $100 to do it, as it was the second qualification to get our $150 in Facebook ad credits, so we got paid to engage with more people!
Here’s how we did it.
Over time, we’ve created a lot of Facebook profiles under a lot of pseudonyms. We use these profiles for various purposes, but primarily games. See, we don’t want to pollute our “real” accounts with family and friends with Farmville requests, or even posts from our business entities. Over time, we’ve amassed quite a few friends on these profiles. Seeing as we wanted to keep the results typical for the average reader here, we didn’t ask any of those friends to like the page, although you could certainly pick up a few likes that way if you wanted from your family and friends.
We did, however, use those accounts to fulfill requests on various Facebook Fan Page exchanges. What’s that you might ask? A Facebook fan exchange is one where people essentially like each other to give each other a boost. It’s not very useful at first glance, as people are simply trading likes for the sake of getting likes, but a savvy Facebook marketer knows that it’s not the people who like you that you’re after… it’s the people who like them!
We’ll post a future blog post about that topic, but essentially, when Joe likes your page, all of Joe’s friends not only see that he liked your page (giving them the chance to check you out) but more importantly, all of Joe’s friends see every update you make to your fan page.
You see our information to the left, were we have 2,266 likes, but really, we’re marketing to close to 3/4 of a million people. That’s worth two hours time.
So, here’s how we did it.
1. we logged into one of our pseudonym accouts.
2. We created accounts at 3 different Facebook Fan Exchange sites. Get Likes Easy, Pulse Exchange, and Facebook Like Exchange.
3. We logged into each site, and just randomly started liking pages. We use these sort of services alot for our Twitter promotions (with sites like Twiends.com) , so we’re pretty good at knowing how to manage credits. Before you take this type of promotion mainstream, you’ll want to play around with how you want to manage each site’s crediting system.
4. Finally, we went over to LinkedIn, and started posting comments on various discussions around the site. We pointed people to our Facebook page, where we got quite a few likes as well.
Long story short, we got 538 likes to our Facebook page in 48 hours, and we’ve got remaining credits to get a couple hundred more.
We’ll report later to see if some of the other goals of our experiment, such as higher traffic to our main site pan out from this experiment. Initial reports show that our traffic definitely went up by about 25%, but it will be interesting to see if that bump in traffic is a one time occurrence, or an ongoing one.
Update 2/28/2012
We had so much success with this experiment that we added a few more Fan Exchange Sites to our arsenal.
Feel free to post your comments about your own experiments with getting likes to your Facebook pages below.
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