So you have a Facebook page – maybe it’s a business or for your website, or perhaps it’s a promotional page for your music band, or even a page you intend to make a living from by selling products or by acquiring opt-in emails – how do you go about building an engaged and targeted follower base for the lowest cost possible?

How To Get 1000's Of Quality Facebook Fans For Free

The downward spiral of dwindling engagement

You’ve all seen the ads, “Get 10,000 Facebook likes for $29”, or maybe you have read articles advising you to buy the lowest possible cost Facebook likes to achieve “social proof” (regardless of their country of origin) or whether the followers are even interested in what your page is all about.

This seems like a great idea at the time – until later you watch your Facebook page crash and burn under the weight of the follower’s indifference and lack of engagement.

Whether bought either directly from Facebook or via third-party services – buying cheap likes – that is sub-$0.01 likes purchased without niche targeting and regardless of geographical origin, cheap followers like this are almost completely worthless to you.

Unfortunately, many of these users will be inactive and via the many third-world “click-farms” that Facebook still struggles to deal with.

Also, while you can go ahead and acquire cheap page followers for a few cents each by using broadly targeted (or even no targeted) Facebook ads with a wide geo, generating untargeted followers this way will destroy your entire Facebook page’s engagement ranking – which in turn will bury your posts way down the Facebook timeline, creating a spiraling lack of engagement and comment, likes and shares.

I’ve spent a good deal of money testing this ‘cheap like social proof’ idea myself and can confirm that it is definitely not conducive to creating a prosperous and successful Facebook page, and you will find it very difficult to create an engaged page that generates traffic based on these cheap likes and inactive followers.

Why engaged and targeted followers are so important

Facebook’s algorithms are largely based on how “engaged” your follower base is – that is: are you posting worthy, interesting, and captivating content that users respond to?

Quite simply a highly-engaged Facebook page will always reach far more people than a page posting content, video, and status updates that are not relevant nor even mildly interesting to the page’s follower base.

Viral post

Despite Facebook’s much-publicized minor algorithm tweaks that come and go with each passing year, posting engaging content consistently will always be the most reliable method to increase your follower base and gain website traffic, while keeping your engagement score high and attracting thousands of new followers to your page at little or no cost.

Not to mention properly targeted followers will keep on “liking” your posts, and sharing your content with their (often similarly niche-targeted) friends.

Acquiring organic followers this way has higher value to your Facebook page and web-based business as a whole than any like or follower that you have bought – either via Facebook’s own ad system or via a third-party vendor.

So where do I start to increase my Facebook page follower base?

Even with the highest engaging content posted to your Facebook wall you can find, if you don’t have enough followers to begin with you won’t make any headway.

You will need to have in place or purchase a reasonable base of targeted followers to build your Facebook page on, and the most efficient and cost-effective method to get these is via Facebook’s own ad system.

I would recommend obtaining at least 5,000 targeted followers for your page to start with, and if you can stretch to it – 15,000 followers is a great place to start if you are aiming to get quick traffic from your page. If done the right way, you can build this seed follower base for very little cost, around $0.06 per like for targeted, active, and geographically useful (tier one country) followers.

It’s all about the Facebook algorithm

The reason you need this initial base of followers is due to the way Facebook distributes page posts. There are so many millions of pages on Facebook and users are usually subscribed to many hundreds of Facebook pages and groups so the timeline simply cannot show all your posts, all the time, especially if you post many times per day.

So Facebook will only show a tiny fraction of your posts to your followers at any one time, and not – as people often think – all of them.

This is what is known as “organic reach”, and is a score that can increase, or drop, at any time, either via Facebook algorithm tweaks or by your own Facebook page health and engagement score.

Facebook metrics home

Simply put – the more engagement you can get on each of your Facebook page posts, the higher your organic reach will be and the more people will see your posts (inorganic reach would be considered any reach you acquired via paid means – boost this post ads, etc.).

A secret sauce to success is to sandwich your money-making link posts in between highly engaging image and video content; you could even increase the organic reach for that monetized link post. In other words, it’s free advertising that can be consistently utilized day after day, year after year.

How to build your followers to thousands

So how do we go about building our Facebook pages to eventually reach many thousands or even hundreds of thousands of targeted, organic followers?

Well, before we lay out the roadmap to get there, be aware it won’t happen overnight.

With the best techniques and viral content in the world, building a large Facebook page takes a lot of time – we are talking years, rather than weeks and months.

Sure, you might have some weeks when you gain over 1,000 followers (my own pages consistently gain many hundreds of followers every week), and if your content goes viral, then boom – you’ll gain a huge number of followers almost overnight, but you just can’t guarantee the content will go viral.

When you see these huge, popular and established Facebook pages with several million followers, be aware these pages likely took years to get there unless they had an astronomical ad budget (which will be a rare case). Some of these huge pages even started at the start of Facebook’s popularity, many years ago and have had well over a decade to mature and grow.

So – with that in mind – the key to generating a massive Facebook follower base is to post a mixture of engaging, ideally unique content consistently and regularly every single day.

A mixture of images and viral memes, native videos (as opposed to links to videos on other sites such as YouTube), engaging status updates and curated posts from other popular niche Facebook pages are just what you need to share on your own page for it to grow.

Suggested for you

By doing this consistently, you can’t really fail to build a growing Facebook base, given enough time and consistent posing of quality, targeted engaging content.

You’ll need to post at least 8 pieces of engaging content per day, very consistently and at set times during the day when your page base is most active (this would be in the evening or weekends usually). If you have enough content however, it’s better to be posting every hour, 24/7.

This is where a third-party social scheduler such as Post Planner or Buffer becomes invaluable; after all, you can’t sit there posting to Facebook all day every day, you need to have a life outside of social media!

Beware of copyright issues

So you’re all set to upload the latest viral video from YouTube to gain massive engagement on your Facebook page. The problem is this kind of material is copyright protected, and Facebook can detect such content and will slap you badly for posting it. First, Facebook’s robot moderators will send you a couple of written warnings.

The third time they may even delete your Facebook account if you consistently post copyrighted material such as YouTube videos, copyrighted music, and branded content you didn’t actually create yourself.

So how do you post consistently brilliant and engaging material multiple times a day if you don’t own the copyright, and have limited content yourself?

Well, that’s where re-sharing viral posts comes in – a way to increase engagement by sharing on your own Facebook page feed engaging content and viral videos other Facebook pages and groups have uploaded, and thereby sneakily absolving yourself of any copyright worries.

After all, you can share anything you like from other Facebook pages, and there will never be a copyright infringement because you did not upload it directly.

Finding suitable content to re-share

It’s important to only re-share content that is popular and currently trending, as this will yield the highest engagement from your followers, and thus increase your post and page reach.

The best content to re-share will almost always be native video and image content – you know those short, viral videos and memes that you see every day trending highly on Facebook. You can also re-share status updates and pretty much anything else you like from other page feeds.

Viral image post

Because these viral posts are already highly engaged – with lots of comments, shares, and reactions – they will usually be shown to a much larger number of your followers than your own, non-trending posts, simply by the nature of Facebook’s algorithm quirks.

Funny, surprising and emotionally inspiring content will always work extremely well for any Facebook page you might have – but if the video is related to your own page niche then even better.

Emotional link post

For example, if you have a Facebook page about dog grooming and you post trending videos with dogs in your timeline, engagement for that post, and thus your organic reach, should be very high.

How will re-sharing successful posts benefit my own page?

So we have established that if a post is a successful piece of content on another Facebook page, it already has the advantage of carrying with it a high engagement score and a powerful virality.

This means if you re-share the post on your own page it will organically reach a high number of your own followers – many of whom will engage, share and comment on that trending content.

They will go on to share that video via your Facebook page to their friends, and so the viral spread outwards continues. Their friends will see your Facebook page at the top of the post (or a link to your website, t-shirt sale or whatever message you have) and click through to your page, rather than the page the content originated from!

A secondary benefit to this re-sharing of successful content is that this highly viral post will in turn increase the engagement rank of your own Follower page, increasing engagement of your own, less viral posts.

This will result in many hundreds of new likes for your Facebook page every week, and over time this will turn into hundreds of thousands of new active, engaged Facebook followers.

When to post engaging content

I recommend re-sharing popular content every two to three hours on your Facebook page, during the twelve to fourteen hours peak period of your page’s follower base demographic.

For example, if your follower base is mainly U.S.-based, and you are posting from the U.K., the most popular times to post would be from 4 pm in the afternoon until around 4 am at night.

Your own Facebook page insights data can give you more information about your demographic, as will third-party social analytic apps such as Fanpage Karma .

If you want to build a reliable, simple and scalable organic traffic channel via Facebook I offer the ultimate tools and training to help!

The Facebook Traffic Blueprint Course: Get lifetime access to this flagship training course, teaching you all aspects of the Facebook organic traffic model in-depth and step-by-step.

1-to-1 Consultations: Gain instant access to over 10 years of Facebook traffic expertise, knowledge, and experience. Ask Me Anything about this method to greatly speed up your progress or troubleshoot existing issues.

The Hike Your Likes Newsletter: Join thousands of other Facebook traffic students learning the methods to get millions of visitors every month from free Facebook traffic.

Andy Skraga

UK-based web entrepreneur with over 10 years of Facebook traffic experience and more than 20 years of professional web development, SEO, digital marketing and Facebook ads experience.

Let's connect on X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndySkraga