A lot of people still haven’t figured out Facebook Fan Pages yet. They go ahead and make these Fan Pages and expect them to grow by themselves. The thing that most people miss in the equation is that, this is social marketing which means there has to be engagement on both fronts. A Facebook Fan Page needs to be strategically planned out in advance in order to make it work. Here are a few things you can do to make your fan page grow organically and when I say organically it means you aren’t paying to market your fan page.

Feature A Fan – Contest
This is one of the strongest methods of growing your fan base. You originally start off with any fan page by inviting mostly your own friends. Now that some of your friends are fans to this page, how do you get their friends to want to fan the page? You get the fans you already have to become little ambassadors to your page by having a virtual contests. When you “Feature A Fan” you are acknowledging them as the winner by calling them out as a “featured fan” in the post of the day which goes out to all of the other fans. 

This might seem trivial to you but the users can’t get enough.You eventually will get people “liking” the posts, commenting on the posts enough for their friends to take notice and come check out what that page is all about. They then get involved in the conversation that is happening on your page and become fans themselves. Everyone wants to be a featured fan so they keep trying to win whatever contest you are having by posting their answers, commenting and “liking” posts. All of this social interaction eventually leads to more and more people fanning your page. A company that does this well is Crackle a company I just happen to work for ; )

Giveaways
Of course another aspect to a contest is obviously SWAG (stuff worth actually getting). If you have something to give away like a t-shirt, hats, beer mugs, PlayStation 3′s. People love free things, even if its the most mundane objects you would be surprised at what people will do for free SWAG. The better the item the more people who will become a fan of your fan page and participate in the conversation. These users are not nearly as valuable to the conversation because you are incentivising them with a tangible object. As soon as its gone they stop interacting. You need to continue to have these giveaways every month so you don’t lose their interest.

Whats The Best Solution?
Using a combination of both ”Feature A Fan” and product giveaways will net you the most users in the shortest amount of time. Both users act completely different so you need to cater to both in different ways. As long as you have two different approaches planned out to these very different fan bases then you should see your fan page start to grow exponentially.

Adding Twitter Into The Mix
You can also leverage your twitter following to your advantage by using twitter as an extension to your contests. You can extend your reach and push users back to your fan page with twitter or you can hold a completely separate contest via twitter and grow your following base there. In this case we know that twitter users act completely different then Facebook users do so you need to figure out what best works for you and what you’re trying to build and accomplish.

So let’s say you have a video online and you want to promote it. You already know your audience lives on Facebook somewhere, but you’re not sure how to reach them and you surely don’t have a ton of money to market this thing. Well, here are 8 ways to effectively promote your video on Facebook for little to no cost, with just the friends you have on Facebook.

1. Event Pages
If you’re on Facebook I’m sure you have received an event reminder to go to a party, bar crawl, or meeting of some kind. Well, you can use these pages to promote your video, as well. Say you’re going to launch a video in a month - first, you set up your event page, and make sure it’s very well done because you’re going to be sending it out to all of your friends (you don’t want to seem like a spammer to your friends so don’t mass message them too often or this won’t work). Next you send your event invite and then follow up with 5 or 10 friends a day to get them on board with the event. Eventually, you will have 30 – 40 people saying they want to be reminded when your video is live. Once the initial users are signed up for the event you can start a simple Facebook ads account and spend as little as $5 a day to promote your event page (although fan pages work better to promote and have people become fans of). $100 later and you have over 300 people wanting to be reminded about your video, not a bad turnout thus far.

2. Fan Pages
Fan pages are the more advanced form of the Events Page. Fan Pages allow you to build a very social community around your video with much less commitment. To say you’re going to an event is much harder for a person to do then it is to push the little Become A Fan button. Because Facebook makes it so easy to become a fan you will find that you will get 10 times the amount of fans than you would find saying yes to your event. You can use your Fan Page to power your Events Page by advertising Become A Fan through Facebook ads and you will garner more fans. So now that you have more fans you start to promote your event on your fan page. The people who start saying yes to your event and who are already fans of your video (even if it’s not yet released) creates a super qualified person who really wants to watch your video, increasing your event page to over 500 within a week (around $200 – $300 spent thus far).

3. Your Friends As Admins
Adding one or two of your friends as admins to your page now increases your reach by 2 or 3 times. Let’s say you have 300 friends and your friend Jack has 500 friends and you add Jack as an admin. You not only have scaled your reach directly to 800 people, but just think of the compounding effect. Jack might have 500 friends, but lets just say 5 of Jacks friends become fans of that page and they each have 500 friends as well. The way Facebook works (you probably already know this) is if those five friends become fans of your page, Facebook tells their friends they became fans, which again compounds on itself. Your chosen admins can make your fan page grow epically, thus creating a built in audience for your video and event page (and you’re still at a total cost of $300).

4. Posting To Other Fan Page Walls
Many self-proclaimed purists won’t like this step, but I’ve found it very effective. Find pages that are very similar to yours (similar type of content) and post your fan page link to their wall. Don’t forget to say something that has some relevance to the wall you are posting on otherwise it doesn’t look authentic enough for it not to be ignored or removed. If you do this a few times to some high fanned pages you can easily pick up another 100 – 200 fans in a few days with minimal effort (also free).

5. Post To Your Friends Walls
Find a few people you know pretty well that have a lot of friends and post the link to your fan page on their wall and mention something relevant in the text field of your post. People will naturally be curious and click to check it out even if they don’t know you or your project, and of course the commitment level is so low they most likely will fan the page if it looks well put together. This might sound like your spamming your friends with these posts, but this is your baby we’re talking about here, they should and will be glad to have a post from you on their wall to help you out. You can easily garner another 100 fans this way in one day, and for free.

6. Smart And Engaging Updates
So now that you have over a 1,000 fans and growing (the compounding effect) to your fan page, you need to chill out on the posts. Only post once a day (twice at most and only if it warrants it). The more you post, the more people will ignore you or un-fan your fan page. Also when you post, make sure it’s not only about your project, post things from around the web that you find interesting (but they have to be really good). You can plan out two posts a week about your project but I would keep it to two max because there’s only so much people will take of the same thing over and over again. You want to ask questions a lot, questions elicit responses and engagement. Once you have trained your fans that your posts are worth reading, and not only worth reading but deserving of a response, they won’t hesitate to take action on your post to go see your video.

7. Holding A Simple Contest On Your Fan Page
You can even hold a contest on your fan page for the price of a t-shirt. Not only do people respond well to contests, they live for them. A small gift of some kind mixed with some fan pics posting to the wall for a contest will put engagement through the roof and get people coming back day after day.

8. “Feature A Fan” strategy
Let’s say you have a contest for the entire month before your video is out. Fans post pictures to the wall everyday to be eligible for the contest prize, which is a nice t-shirt at the end of the month to the winner. Everyday pick one fan who submitted a picture and feature them on your one daily post. This is by far one of the most effective methods of getting your users engaged on the site. On a fan page I was involved in, we saw user interactions grow by 500% over the month we ran the Feature A Fan strategy. Everyone likes to have a little fame and that’s their day to brag to their friends that they made the Featured Friend List on “Video X’s” Fan page.

So to summarize, if you have a video along with a very tight budget there are still some great ways to leverage Facebook in order to make a very meaningful impact on how many people get to see and know about your video for free. One last thing I would like to stress; don’t forget about your fans. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is people abandoning their fan pages once their video has launched leaving your fans in limbo. Your fans are like a plant, if you don’t feed them with new posts they wither and die. Your fans will be there when your video launches, and they will still be there when it’s been out for a year. Keep that mini-community up to date so when your next video/project is coming out you aren’t scrambling to complete the 8 steps again. Good Luck!