Boosting Business Outcomes with Facebook Top Fans

Boosting Business Outcomes with Facebook Top Fans

If you’re a business with a strong Facebook following, it might be time to ramp up your efforts and start rewarding your followers with a top fan badge. While you’re at it, why not develop a top-fan marketing campaign to build stronger relationships and encourage deeper loyalty?

Hootsuite reports that over 87 percent of small businesses are using Facebook for marketing. With so much competition, the average monthly change in page likes is only .13 percent. However, adopting a top fan marketing strategy can help you to boost engagement, driving up the number of interactions to ensure that more people see the content you publish. Here is how it works.

Starting a Facebook Top Fans Marketing Program

A Facebook Top-Fan campaign is designed to build stronger relationships with your most active followers to bolster continued engagement. Engagement is essential for businesses who use Facebook for marketing as it directly correlates to how many people see your posts. Higher engagement with your business page means Facebook will show your content to more people.

Facebook makes it easy to identify your top fans by providing badges. The platform then allows you to target posts and special offers directly to your devotees—the people who are most likely to engage with your content.

In essence, a Facebook top-fan campaign should be designed to reward your most engaged followers for their loyalty and can take a variety of approaches. At FNBO, we’ve uncovered some best-practice approaches:

• Engage: There is no better way to make your top fans feel special than to personally engage with them through your business page. That includes replying to their comments on your posts as well as liking and commenting on posts they make.
• Consistency is key: Liking a top fan post or comment one week and ignoring them the next won’t do much to encourage loyalty. Make sure you are consistent in your interactions with top fans.
• Give them a behind-the-scenes look: Since Facebook makes it simple to identify top fans, why not use it to your advantage by offering them special content reserved just for your most devoted followers. Some ideas include videos offering a private tour of your facilities or how a product is made, introductions or interviews with key employees, or even private facts known only to a few.
• Offer special incentives: Truly reward your top fans with special contests or giveaways that only available to these loyal followers. We recently offered 3 campfire mugs to our top fans and received 66 comments on a single post.
• Don’t be afraid to step outside the top-fan circle: The more top-fans your page has, the easier it is to receive the likes, comments and shares that increase engagement. From time to time, let your regular followers in on the top-fan secret by alerting them to special offers that are reserved for top followers. Inform them of what it takes to become a top fan and watch engagement rise.

As you engage with your top fans, you’re creating brand ambassadors, devotees who will speak for your business on a positive level. According to Fundera, 74 percent of consumers rely on social media to guide purchasing decisions.

Top Fans Provide a Sounding Board

Top fans are also a great resource for evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing program, so use them as a mini-focus group. At FNBO, we regularly seek feedback from top fans about elements of our strategy, such as giveaways. If top fans give us the thumbs up, we know it’s a well-liked item that we can offer to customers.

For product-oriented businesses, giving your top fans an insider peek into a new item or line can provide critical feedback, allowing you to gauge the popularity of merchandise before you heavily invest. Top fans can also help you fine-tune your marketing strategy before taking it to a broader audience. Odds are, if your top fans aren’t reacting positively to a post, piece of content, or even promoted merchandise, neither will your general followers.

In the end, rewarding your top fans will boost engagement with your Facebook page, but more importantly, boost your business outcomes overall by encouraging the type of customer loyalty that leads to word-of-mouth recommendations.

Want to learn more about how you can market your business? Check out more marketing insight articles.