You have put in your company logo and cover photo and invited all your friends and business contacts to join your Facebook fanpage, so you’re done setting up right? Well, maybe. You want to know the dirty secret very few people will be willing to tell you? If you use a tool like Shortstack (see screenshot above) to build a landing page to drive your potential fans to, more of them will like your page!
Getting people to like your Facebook page is really no different than getting them to perform any other conversion on the web. Sure, if you drive every potential website visitor to the homepage of your website some will navigate around, find your offers, and convert. However, if you use targeted landing pages for different types of conversions and drive your traffic to them, your conversion rates go through the roof. Facebook is no different.
Instead of dropping every potential Facebook fan directly onto your company Timeline, create a landing page using a tool like the one we mentioned above to a more customized tab to drive traffic to. For example, if you have a link to your fan page from your website (and you should!), you can create a tab thanking visitors for clicking through from your website and explaining what kind of content your fanpage will offer them above and beyond what they are used to. This works extremely well for two reasons. First by acknowledging where they are coming (in this case, your website), you reassure potential fans they have arrived at the correct place. Second, by utilizing this approach, you have the opportunity to actually let potential fans know what kind of content they can expect from your page, instead of just dropping them into your Timeline and hoping they can figure it out. Both of these factors combined help to increase the number of “potential” fans who turn into real fans by actually “liking” your page.
Using third party services to create custom landing pages also serves one other highly under-utilized purpose. It allows you to run contests that comply with Facebook’s terms and conditions. Contests are a great way to drive long-term fanpage growth and can cost you little to nothing, in terms of your overall marketing budget. Please note, you NEED to be using a third party provider to run your Facebook contests. Not using a third party app is a violation of the Facebook Terms and Conditions and an all-around great way to get your page deleted (and no one wants that!).
Have you had any success using third party applications to create landing pages for your Facebook fans? Have a successful contest idea you’d like to share, or just think we are nuts for thinking people should build landing pages? Let us know in the comments below!
