Paying to build up your audience

When you create a social media advert you can choose what the advert prompts the viewer to do.  Often you will want the person to go to your website, but you can also run adverts to get people to ‘like’ your page or account also.  There’s a lot of bad press about paying for followers, but we’re not talking about fake accounts and online ‘bots’; we’re talking about real people who are likely to become real customers – and that makes a lot of sense for businesses.

This is especially useful if you are setting up a new social media page, or if you’re stuck on a couple of hundred followers.  A few weeks of running an advert to get more people to like your page can soon give you a few hundred, or even a few thousand, new followers.  And this makes sense for a number of reasons.  First, people still do tend to make a judgement on your company based on how many followers you have or how many people like your Facebook page – it’s called ‘social proof’: if a lot of people like your page then you must be a great company.  Second, it can work out cheaper in the long run to first pay for people to follow your page who have an interest in your product, and then talk to them for free to nurture them into becoming customers once they are following you.